SHORT STUDIES 



GEEAT SUBJECTS, 



SHORT STUDIES 



ON 



GREAT SUBJECTS 



JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. 

LATE FELLOW OF EXETER. COLLEGE, OXFORD. 



^v^^y 



%- 



NEW YORK: 
CHARLES SCRIBNER AND COMPANY i 

1868. ! 



RIVERSIDE. CAMBRIDGE : 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED Bt 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



1?^ 



CONTENTS. 

— • — 

VAQE 

The Science of Histoky . . . , 7 

Times op Erasmus and Luther : 

Lectixre 1 37 

Lecture II. 66 

Lecture III 96 

The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Char- 
acter 128 

The Philosophy of Catholicism 155 

A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficul- 
ties 166 

Criticism and the Gospel History 197 

The Book of Job 228 

Spinoza 274 

The Dissolution of the Monasteries 324 

England's Forgotten Worthies 358 

Homer 406 

The Lives of the Saints 440 

Representative IMen 465 

Reynard the Fox . • 486 

The Cat's Pilgrimage 508 

Fables : 

L The Lions and the Oxen 525 

II. The Farmer and the Fox 526 

Parable of the Bread-fruit Tree 529 

Compensation 533 



<r9 



> 



THE 

SCIENCE OF HISTORY: 

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, 
February 5, 1864. 



Ladies and Gentlemen, — I have undertaken to speak 
to you this evening on what is called the Science of His- 
tory. I fear it is a dry subject ; and there seems, indeed, 
something incongruous in the very connection of such 
words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk 
of the color of sound, or the longitude of the Rule-of-three. 
Where it is so difficult to make out the truth on the com- 
monest disputed fact in matters passing under our very 
eyes, how can we talk of a science in things long past, 
which come to us only through books ? It often seems to 
me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with 
which we can spell any word we please. We have only to 
pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, 
and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose. 

I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try 
not to weary you ; but I am doubtful of my success either 
way. First, however, I wish to say a word or two about 
the eminent person whose name is connected with this 
way of looking at History, and whose premature death 
struck us all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, 
perhaps, recollect Mr. Buckle as he stood not so long ago 
in this place. He spoke more than an hour without a note. 



8 The Science of JIi%toTij. 

— never repeating himself, never wasting words ; laying 
out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been 
talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we 
pleased of Mr. Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that 
he was a man of uncommon power ; and he had qualities 
also — qualities to which he, perhaps, himself attached little 
value — as rare as they were admirable. 

Most of us, when we have hit on something which we 
are pleased to think important and original, feel as if we 
should burst with it. We come out into the book-market 
with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and recognition. 
Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which 
made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. 
He knew that whenever he pleased he could command per- 
sonal distinction, but he cared more for his subject than 
for himself. He was contented to work with patient reti- 
cence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years ; and then, 
at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at 
once into French and German, and, of all places in the 
world, fluttered the dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of 
St. Petersburg. 

Goethe says somewhere, that, as soon as a man has done 
any thing remarkable, there seems to be a general conspir- 
acy to prevent him from doing it again. He is feasted, 
feted, caressed ; his time is stolen from him by breakfasts, 
dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand kinds. Mr. 
Buckle had his share of all this ; but there are also more 
dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He 
had scarcely won for himself the place which he deserved, 
than his health was found shattered by his labors. He 
had but time to show us how large a man he was, time 
just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed 
away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to re- 
cover strength for his work, but his work was done with and 
over. He died of a fever at Damascus, vexed only that he 
was compelled to leave it uncompleted. Almost his last 



The Science of History. 9 

conscious words were, " My book, my book ! I shall never 
finish my book ! " He went away as he had lived, nobly 
careless of himself, and thinking only of the thing which 
he had undertaken to do. 

But his labor had not been thrown away. Disagree 
with him as we might, the effect which he had already pro- 
duced was unmistakable, and it is not likely to pass away. 
What he said was not essentially ncAv. Some such inter- 
pretation of human things is as early as the beginning of 
thought. But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art 
which' belongs to men of genius: he could present his 
opinions with peculiar distinctness ; and, on the other 
hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present 
current among us for which those opinions have an unusual 
fiiscination. They do not please us, but they excite and. 
irritate us. We are angry with them ; and we betray, in 
being so, an uneasy misgiving that there may be more 
truth in those opinions than we like to allow. 
'^Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind : 
When human creatures began first to look about them in 
the world they lived in, there seemed to be no order in 
any thing. Days and nights were not the same length. 
The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of 
the stars rose and set like the sun ; some were almost 
motionless in the sky ; some described circles round a cen- 
tral star above the north horizon. The planets went on 
principles of their own ; and in the elements there seemed 
nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go 
out in eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake 
under men's feet ; and they could only suppose that earth 
and air and sky and water were inhabited and managed by 
creatures as wayward as themselves. 

Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. 
Certain influences seemed beneficent to men, others ma- 
lignant and destructive ; and the world was supposed to be 
animated by good spirits and evil spirits, who were contin- 



10 The Science of History, 

iially fighting against each other, in outward nature and in 
human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed 
more and imagined less, these interpretations gave way 
also. Phenomena the most opposite in effect were seen to 
be the result of the same natural law. The fire did not 
burn the house down if the owners of it were careful, but 
remained on the hearth and boiled the pot ; nor did it 
seem more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than 
a good man's, provided the badness did not take the form 
of negligence. The phenomena of nature were found for 
the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and 
their variations to be such as could be counted upon. 
From observing the order of things, the step was easy to 
cause and effect. An eclipse, instead of being a sign of 
the anger of Heaven, was found to be the necessary and 
innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and 
earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to 
the beings who had imagined that all creation was watch- 
ing them and their doings. By degrees caprice, volition, 
all symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared out of the 
universe ; and almost every phenomenon in earth or 
heaven was found attributable to some law, either under- 
stood or perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed 
from the imagination. \. The first fantastic conception of 
things gave way before the moral ; the moral in turn gave 
way before the natural ; and at last there was left but one 
small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to 
penetrate, — the doings and characters of human creatures 
themselves. 

There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and 
emotion, conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still 
conceived to exist. Cause and effect were not traceable 
when there was a free volition to disturb the connection. 
In all other things, from a given set of conditions the con- 
sequences necessarily followed. With man^ the word " law " 
changed its meaning ; and instead of a fixed order, which 



The Science of History, 11 

he could not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, 
which he might disobey if he dared. 

This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy 
which prevailed throughout nature, he thought it very un- 
likely should admit of this exception. He considered that 
human beings acted necessarily from the impulse of out- 
ward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condi- 
tion at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted 
from a motive ; and his conduct was determined by the 
motive which affected him most powerfully. Every man 
naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him ; 
but, to do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so 
long as he does not know that it is poison. Let him see 
that it will kill him, and he will not touch it. The ques- 
tion was not of moral right and wrong. Once let him be 
thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and 
he will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His vir- 
tues are the result of knowledge ; his faults, the necessary 
consequence of the want of it. A boy desires to draw. 
He knows nothing about it : he draws men like trees or 
houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes 
mistakes, because he knows no better. We do not blame 
him. Till he is better taught, he cannot help it. But his 
instruction beo^ins. He arrives at straisfht lines ; then at 
solids ; then at curves. He learns perspective, and light 
and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which 
he wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he per- 
ceives the means by which they are produced. He has 
learned what to do ; and, in part, he has learned how to do 
it. His afler-progress will depend on the amount of force 
which his nature possesses ; but all this is as natural as 
the growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn 
that it is its duty to become a large tree ; you do not 
preach to the art-pupil that it is his duty to become a 
Holbein. You plant your acorn in favorable soil, where 
it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind ; 



12 The Science of History. 

you remove the superfluous branches, you train the 
strength into the leading shoots. The acorn will then 
become as fine a tree as it has vital force to become. The 
difference between men and other things is only in the 
largeness and variety of man's capacities ; and in this 
special capacity, that he alone has the power of observing 
the circumstances favorable to his own growth, and can 
apply them for hiqiself, yet, again, with this condition, — 
that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose 
whether he will make use of these appliances or not. 
When he knows what is good for him, he will choose it ; 
and he will judge what is good for him by the circum- 
stances which have made him what he is. 

And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he 
always had done. His history had been a natural growth 
as much as the growth of the acorn. His improvement 
had followed the progress of his knowledge ; and, by a 
comparison of his outward circumstances with the condi- 
tion of his mind, his whole proceedings on this planet, his 
creeds and constitutions, his good deeds and his bad, his 
arts and his sciences, his empires and his revolutions, 
would be found all to arrange themselves into clear rela- 
tions of cause and effect. 

If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we ob- 
jected the difficulty of finding what the truth about past 
times really was, he would admit it candidly as far as con- 
cerned individuals ; but there was not the same difficulty, 
he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about 
the character of Julius or Tiberius Caesar, but we could 
know well enough the Romans of the Empire. We had 
their literature to tell us how they thought ; we had their 
laws to tell us how they governed ; we had the broad face 
of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their gen- 
eral doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He be- 
lieved it was all reducible to laws, and could be made as 
intelligible as the growth of the chalk cliflTs or the coal 
measures. 



The Science of History, 13 

And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for in- 
dividuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that 
the history of mankind is the history of its great men. 
Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the 
same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more 
erratic. With them or without them, the course of things 
would have been much the same. 

I/A?, an illustration of the truth of his view, he would 
point to the new science of Political Economy. Here 
already was a large area of human activity in which nat- 
ural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had gone 
on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral princi- 
ples. They would fix wages according to some imaginary 
rule of fairness ; they would fix prices by what they con- 
sidered things ought to cost ; they encouraged one trade 
or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as 
well have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. 
The great statesmen whose names were connected with 
these enterprises might have as well legislated that water 
should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed in the 
conditions of things ; and to contend against them was the 
old battle of the Titans against the gods. 

As it was with political economy, so it was with all other 
forms of human activity ; and, as the true laws of political 
economy explained the troubles which people fell into in 
old times because they were ignorant of them, so the true 
laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them, would 
explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable 
us to manage better for the future. Geographical position, 
climate, air, soil, and the like, had their several influences. 
The northern nations are hardy and industrious, because 
they must till the earth if they would eat the fruits of it, 
and because the temperature is too low to make an idle 
life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, 
while less food is wanted and fewer clothes ; and, in the ex- 
quisite air, exertion is not needed to make the sense of 



14 The Science of History. 

existence delightful. Therefore, in the south we find men 
lazy and indolent. 

True, there are difficulties in these views ; the home of 
the languid Italian was the home also of the sternest race 
of whom the story of mankind retains a record. And 
again, when we are told that the Spaniards are supersti- 
tious because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we re- 
member Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes 
are most frequent, and where at the same time there is the 
most serene disbelief in any supernatural agency whatso- 
ever. 

Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural 
laws, they cannot help being what they are ; and, if they 
cannot help being what they are, a good deal will have to 
be altered in our general view of human obligations and 
responsibilities. 

That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of 
truth, is quite certain, were there but a hope that those 
who maintain them would be contented with that admission. 
A man born in a Mahometan country grows up a Mahom- 
etan ; in a Catholic country, a Catholic ; in a Protestant 
country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language : 
he learns to think as he learns to speak ; and it is absurd 
to suppose him responsible for being what nature makes 
him. We take pains to educate children. There is a 
good education and a bad education ; there are rules well 
ascertained by which characters are influenced ; and, 
clearly enough, it is no mere matter for a boy's free will 
whether he turns out well or ill. We try to train him 
into good habits ; we keep him out of the way of tempta- 
tions ; we see that he is well taught ; we mix kindness and 
strictness ; we surround him with every good influence we 
can command. These are what are termed the advan- 
tages of a good education ; and, if we fail to provide those 
under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the respon- 
sibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once 



The Science of History, 15 

an admission of the power over us of outward circum- 
stances. 

In the same way, we allow for the strength of tempta- 
tions, and the like. 

In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do neces- 
sarily absorb, out of the influences in which they grow up, 
something which gives a complexion to their whole after- 
character. 

When historians have to relate great social or specula- 
tive changes, the overthrow of a monarchy or the establish- 
ment of a creed, they do but half their duty if thoy merely 
relate the events. In an account, for instance, of the rise 
of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the charac- 
ter of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the 
means which he made use of, and the effect which he pro- 
duced ; the historian must show what there was in the con- 
dition of the eastern races which enabled Mahomet to act 
upon them so powerfully ; their existing beliefs, their ex- 
isting moral and political condition. 

In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of 
the future, in the judgments which we pass upon one 
another, we measure responsibility, not by the thing done, 
but by the opportunities which people have had of know- 
ing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep 
our children from bad associations or friends, we admit that 
external circumstances have a powerful effect in making 
men what they are. 

But are circumstances every thing ? That is the whole 
question. A science of history, if it is more than a mis- 
leading name, implies that the relation between cause and 
effect holds in human things as completely as in all others ; 
that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for in 
mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which 
are palpable and ponderable. 

When natural causes are liable to be set aside and 
neutralized by what is called volition, the word Science is 



16 The Science of History. 

out of place. If it is free to man to choose what he will 
do or not do, there is no adequate science of him. If 
there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the 
praise or blame with which we regard one another are im- 
pertinent and out of place. 

I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, 
unless I do, the subject cannot be made intelligible. Man- 
kind are but an aggregate of individuals ; History is but 
the record of individual action : and what is true of the 
part is true of the whole. 

We feel keenly about such things, and, when the logic 
becomes perplexing, we are apt to grow rhetorical about 
them. But rhetoric is only misleading. Whatever the 
truth may be, it is best that we should know it ; and for 
truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as 
cool as we can. 

I will say at once, that, if we had the whole case before 
us ; if we were taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the 
council chamber of Nature, and were shown what we 
really were, where we came from, and where we were 
going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to 
find ourselves, like Tarquin, made into villains, from the 
subtle necessities of " the best of all possible worlds," — 
nevertheless, some such theory as Mr. Buckle's might pos- 
sibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is some 
great " equation of the universe " where the value of the 
unknown quantities can be determined. But we must 
treat things in relation to our own powers and position ; 
and the question is, whether the sweep of those vast curves 
can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day like 
ourselves. 

The " Faust " of Goethe, tired of the barren round of 
earthly knowledge, calls magic to his aid. He desires, 
first, to see the spirit of the Macrocosmos, but his heart 
fails him before he ventures that tremendous experiment, 
and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own 



The Science of History. 17 

race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of 
life and the storm of action, the everlasting ocean of ex- 
istence, the web and the woof, and the roaring loom of 
Time, — he gazes upon them all, and in passionate exulta- 
tion claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. 
But the majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him, — 
" Thou art fellow with the spirits which thy mind can grasp, 
not with me." 

Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, 
it might have fared no better with him than with " Faust." 
V What are the conditions of a science ? and when may 
any subject be said to enter the scientific stage ? I sup- 
pose when the facts of it begin to resolve themselves into 
groups ; when phenomena are no longer isolated expe- 
riences, but appear in connection and order ; when, after 
certain antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly 
seen to follow ; when facts enough have been collected to 
furnish a basis for conjectural explanation ; and when con- 
jectures have so far ceased to be utterly vague that it is 
possible in some degree to foresee the future by the help 
of them. 

Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a 
science of it is an abuse of language. It is not enough to 
say that there must be a science of human things because 
there is a science of all other things. This is like saying 
the planets must be inhabited because the only planet of 
which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or 
may not be true, but it is not a practical question ; it does 
not affect the practical treatment of the matter in hand. 

Let us look at the history of Astronomy. 

So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be 
gods or angels ; so long as the sword of Orion was not a 
metaphor, but a fact, and the groups of stars which inlaid 
the floor of heaven were the glittering trophies of the 
loves and wars of the Pantheon, — so long there was no 
science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, 



18 The Science of History. 

poetry, perhaps reverence, but no science. As soon, how- 
ever, as it was observed that the stars retained their rela- 
tive places ; that the times of their rising and setting 
varied with the seasons ; ' that sun, moon, and planets 
moved among them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac 
was marked out and divided, — then a new order of things 
becan. Traces of the earlier stasre remained in the 
names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandi- 
navian mythology survives now in the names of the days 
of the week : but, for all that, the understanding was now 
at v/ork on the thing ; Science had begun, and the first 
triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future. 
Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen 
years, and philosophers were able to say when ati eclipse 
was to be looked for. The periods of the planets were 
determined. Theories were invented to account for their 
eccentricities ; and, false as those theories might be, the 
position of the planets could be calculated with moderate 
certainty by them. The very first result of the science, 
in its most imperfect stage, was a power of foresight ; and 
this was possible before any one true astronomical law had 
been discovered. 

We should not therefore question the possibility of a 
science of history because the explanations of its phenom- 
ena were rudimentary or imperfect : that they might be, 
and might long continue to be, and yet enough might be 
done to show that there was such a thing, and that it was 
not entirely without use. But how was it that in those 
rude days, with small knowledge of mathematics, and with 
no better instruments than flat walls and dial-plates, those 
first astronomers made progress so considerable ? Because, 
I suppose, the phenomena which they were observing re- 
curred, for the most part, within moderate intervals ; so 
that they could collect large experience within the compass 
of their natural lives ; because days and months and years 
were measurable periods, and within them the more simple 
phenomena perpetually repeated themselves. 



The Science of History, 19 

But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its 
axis once in twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year 
about it ; if the year had been nearly four hundred years ; 
if man's life had been no longer than it is, and for the 
initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to de- 
pend upon except observations recorded in history ? How 
many ages would have passed, had this been our condition, 
before it would have occurred to any one, that, in what 
they saw night after night, there was any kind of order at 
all? 

We can see to some extent how it would have been, by 
the present state of those parts of the science which in fact 
depend on remote recorded observations. The movements^ 
of the comets are still extremely uncertain. The times 
of their return can be calculated only with the greatest 
vagueness. 

And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would 
but inadequately express the position in which we are in 
fact placed towards history. There the phenomena never 
repeat themselves. There we are dependent wholly on 
the record of things said to have happened once, but 
which never happen or can happen a second time. There 
no experiment is possible ; we can watch for no recurring 
fact to test the worth of our conjectures. It has been 
suggested fancifully, that, if we consider the universe to be 
infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is per- 
petually present. Light takes nine years to come to us 
from Sirius : those rays which we may see to-night, when 
we leave this place, left Sirius nine years ago ; and, could 
the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth at this moment, 
they would see the English army in the trenches before 
Sebastopol, Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over 
the wounded at Inkermann, and the peace of England 
undisturbed by " Essays and Reviews." 

As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with 
them ; and there may be, and probably are, stars from 



20 Tlie Science of History. 

which Noah might be seen stepping into the ark, Eve list- 
ening to the temptation of the serpent, or that older race, 
eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them, 
when the Baltic was an open sea. 

Could we but compare notes, something might be done ; 
but of this there is no present hope, and without it there 
will be no science of history. Eclipses, recorded in an- 
cient books, can be verified by calculations, and lost dates 
can be recovered by them ; and we can foresee, by the laws 
which they follow, when there will^be ecHpses again. A¥ill 
a time ever be when the lost secret of the foundation of 
Rome can be recovered by historic laws ? If not, where 
is our science ? It may be said that this is a particular 
fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general jDhenom- 
ena affecting eras and cycles. AVell, then, let us take 
some general phenomenon ; Mahometanism, for instance, 
or Buddhism. Those are large enough. Can you imag- 
ine a science which would have -^ foretold such movements 
as those ? The state of things out of which they rose is 
obscure ; but, suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, 
with any amount of historical insight into the old oriental 
beliefs, you could have seen that they were about to trans- 
form themselves into those particular forms and no other ? 

It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can 
understand partially how Mahometanism came to be. All 
historians worth the name have told us something about 
that. But when we talk of science, we mean something 
with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which 
can foresee as well as explain ; and, thus looked at, to 
state the problem is to show its absurdity. As little could 
the wisest man have foreseen this mighty revolution, as 
thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could have 

1 It is objected that Geology is a science : yet that Geology cannot fore- 
tell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a centuv}'- old, 
and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if Geology cannot 
foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison to foretell the discov- 
ery of Australian ^^old. 



The Science of History. 21 

been anticipated in America; as little as it could have 
been foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would 
have been an outcome of the scientific culture of England 
in the nineteenth century. 

The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at 
the seething mass of moral putrefaction round him, de- 
tected and deioned to notice amono- its elements a certain 
detestable superstition, so he called it, rising up amidst the 
ofFscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity. 
Could Tacitus have looj^ed forward nine centuries to the 
Rome of Gregory VIL, could he have beheld the represen- 
tative of the majesty of the Caesars holding the stirrup of 
the Pontiff of that vile and execrated sect, the spectacle 
would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfillment of a 
rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes 
in operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before 
the science of history ; but would M. Comte have seen any 
more clearly ? 

Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon 
our philosophy ; if we content ourselves with the past, and 
require only a scientific explanation of that. 

First, for the facts themselves. They come to us 
through the minds of those who recorded them, neither 
machines nor angels, but fallible creatures, with human 
passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides were 
perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writ- 
ing history ; the ablest, and also the most incapable of 
conscious falsehood. Yet even now, after all these centu- 
ries, the truth of what they relate is called in question. 
Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them 
can be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom 
are we to believe ? 

Or, again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my 
simile of the box of letters, you have but to select such 
facts as suit you, you have but to leave alone those which 
do not suit you, and, let your theory of history be what 



22 The Science of History. 

it will, you can find no difficulty, in providing facts to 
prove it. 

You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or 
you may have your Schlegel's philosophy of history ; you 
may prove from history that the world is governed in 
detail by a special Providence ; you may prove that there 
is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man ; 
you may believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the 
wisdom of antiquity ; you may speak, as was the fashion in 
the fifteenth century, of " our fathers, who had more wit 
and wisdom than we ; " or you may talk of " our barbarian 
ancestors," and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites 
and crows. 

You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has 
been an unbroken progress towards perfection ; you may 
maintain that there has been no progress at all, and that 
man remains the same poor creature that he ever was ; 
or, lastly, you may say, with the author of the " Contract 
Social," that men were purest and best in primeval sim- 
plicity, — 

" When wild in woods the noble savage ran." 

In all or any of these views, history will stand your 
friend. History, in its passive irony, will make no objec- 
tion. Like Jarno, in Goethe's novel, it will not condescend 
to argue with you, and will provide you with abundant illus- 
trations of any thing which you may wish to believe. 

'• What is history," said Napoleon, " but a fiction agreed 
upon ? " " My friend," said Faust to the student, who was 
growing enthusiastic about the spirit of past ages, — " my 
friend, the times which are gone are a book with seven 
seals ; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the 
spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those 
ages are reflected." 

One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat 
with distinctness : that the world is built somehow on moral 
foundations ; that, in the long run, it is well with the good ; 



The Science of History. 23 

in the long run, it is ill with the wicked. But this is no 
science ; it is no more than the old doctrine taught long 
ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M. Comte 
and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond 
the trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely 
animals, they are at least half animals, and are subject in 
this aspect of them to the conditions of animals. So far 
as those parts of man's doings are concerned, which neither 
have, nor need have, any thing moral about them, so far 
the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his 
digestion, and laws of the means by which his digestive 
organs are supplied with matter. But pass beyond them, 
and where are we ? In a world where it would be as easy 
to calculate men's actions by laws like those of positive 
philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot- 
rule, or' weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale. 

And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The 
first principle, on which the theory of a science of history 
can be plausibly argued, is that all actions whatsoever arise 
from self-interest. It may be enlightened self-interest, it 
may be unenlightened ; but it is assumed as an axiom, that 
every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something 
which he considers will i^romote his happiness. His con- 
duct is not determined by his Avill ; it is determined by the 
object of his desire. Adam Smith, in laying the founda- 
tions of political economy, expressly eliminates every other 
motive. He does not say that men never act on other 
motives ; still less, that they never ought to act on other 
motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of pro- 
duction are concerned, and of buying and selling, the action 
of self-interest may be counted upon as uniform. What 
Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr. Buckle would 
extend over the whole circle of human activity. 

Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of 
man from a low order of man — that which constitutes hu- 
man goodness, human greatness, human nobleness — is 



24 The Science of History. 

surely not the degree of enlightenment with which men 
pursue their own advantage : but it is self-forgetfulness ; it 
is self-sacrifice ; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, 
personal indulgence, personal advantages remote or pres- 
ent, because some other line of conduct is more right. 

We are sometimes told that this is but ^another way of 
expressing the same thing ; that, when a man prefers doing 
what is right, it is only because to do right gives him a 
higher satisfaction. It appears to me, on the contrary, to 
be a difference in the very heart and nature of things. The 
martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not 
with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because 
it is a glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. 
And so through all phases of existence, to the smallest de- 
tails of common life, the beautiful character is the unselfish 
character. Those whom we most love and admire are 
those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur ; 
who do simply and with no ulterior aim — with no thought 
whether it will be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant — 
that which is good and right and generous. 

Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened ? I do not 
think so. The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. 
Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great 
action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower. Surely 
it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a martyr who 
dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy ; 
and the greatest of that great company in all ages would 
have done what they did, had their personal prospects closed 
with the grave. Nay, there have been those so zealous for 
some glorious principle as to wish themselves blotted out 
of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven could suc- 
ceed. 

And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise 
the higher relations of human life, the higher modes of hu- 
man obligation. Kant, the philosopher, used to say that 
there were two thino-s which overwhelmed him with awe as 



Tlie Science of History. 25 

he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space, 
without limit and without end ; the other was, right and 
wrong. Right, the sacrifice of self to good ; wrong, the 
sacrifice of good to self, — not graduated objects of desire, 
to which we are determined by the degrees of our knowl- 
edge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as light and dark- 
ness : one the object of infinite love ; the other, the object 
of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvelous 
power in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the 
less true for that), — it is in this power to do wrong — 
wrong or right, as it lies somehow with ourselves to choose 
— that the inipossibility stands of forming scientific calcu- 
lations of what men will do before the fact, or scientific 
explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men 
were consistently selfish, you might analyze their motives ; 
if they were consistently noble, they would express in their 
conduct the laws of the highest perfection. But so long as 
two natures are mixed together, and the strange creature 
which results from the combination is now under one influ- 
ence and now under another, so long you will make noth- 
ing of him except from the old-fashioned moral — or, if 
you please, imaginative — point of view. 

Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide 
us when they touch moral government. So long as labor 
is a chattel to be bought and sold, so long, like other com- 
modities, it follows the condition of supply and demand. 
But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers that he 
stands in human relations towards his workmen ; if he be- 
lieves, rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them ; 
that in return for their labor he is bound to see that their 
children are decently taught, and they and their families 
decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he ought to care 
for them in sickness and in old age, — then political econ- 
omy will no longer direct him, and the relations between 
himself and his dependents will have to be arranged on 
quite other principles. 



§6' The Science of History. 

So long as he considers only his own material profit, so 
long supply and demand will settle every difficulty: but 
the introduction of a new factor spoils the equation. 

And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low mo- 
tives and noble emotions ; in the struggle, ever failing yet 
ever renewed, to carry truth and justice into the adminis- 
tration of human society ; in the establishment of states 
and in the overthrow of tyrannies ; in the rise and fall of 
creeds ; in the world of ideas ; in the character and deeds 
of the great actors in the drama of life, where good and 
evil fight out their everlasting battle, now ranged in oppo- 
site camps, now and more often in the heart, both of them, 
of each living man, — that the true human interest of his- 
tory resides. The progress of industries, the growth of ma- 
terial and mechanical civilization, are interesting ; but they 
are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the 
increase of material comforts ; but, unless we are mistaken 
about our nature, they do not highly concern us after all. 

Once more : not only is there in men this baffling duality 
of principle, but there is something else in us which still 
more defies scientific analysis. 

Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentrici- 
ties of this and that individual by a doctrine of averages. 
Though he cannot tell whether A, B, or C will cut his 
throat, he may assure himself that one man in every fifty 
thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion), 
will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself No 
doubt it is a comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the aver- 
age of one generation need not be the average of the next. 
We may be converted by the Japanese, for all that we know, 
and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may become 
fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that 
the whole race of men would at last become so disgusted 
with their impotence, that they would extinguish themselves 
by a simultaneous act of suicide, and make room for a bet- 
ter order of beings ? Anyhow, the fountain out of which 



The Science of History. 27 

the race is flowing perpetually changes ; no two generations 
are alike. Whether there is a change in the organization 
itself we cannot tell ; but this is certain, — that, as the 
planet varies with the atmosphere which surrounds it, so 
each new generation varies from the last, because it inhales 
as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowl- 
edge of the whole past of the w^orld. These things form 
the spiritual air which we breathe as we grow ; and, in the 
infinite multiplicity of elements of which that air is now 
composed, it is forever matter of conjecture what the minds 
w^ill be like w'hich expand under its influence. 

From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the 
England of Miss Austen, from the England of Miss 
Austen to the England of Eailways and Freetrade, how 
vast the change ! Yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would 
not seem so strangre to us now as one of ourselves will 
seem to our great-grandchildren. The world moves faster 
and faster ; and the difference will probably be considera- 
bly greater. 

The temper of each new generation is a continual sur- 
prise. The Fates delight to contradict our most confident 
expectations. Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors 
w^as at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he 
would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a 
few years ago we believed the world had grown too civ- 
ilized for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was 
to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles bloody as 
Napoleon's are now the familiar tale of every day ; and 
the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of 
destruction. What next ? We may strain our eyes into 
the future which lies beyond this waning century ; but / 
never was conjecture more at fault. It is blank darkness, / 
which even the imagination fails to people. ' 

What, then, is the us,£_Q£-Jlistory, and what are its les- 
sons ? If it can tell us little of the past, and nothing of 
the future, why waste our time over so barren a study ? 



28 Tlie Science of History. 

First, it is a voice forever sounding across the centuries 
the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners 
change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written 
on the tablets of eternity. For every false wor^or un- 
righteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or van- 
ity, the price has to be paid at last; not always by the 
chief offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth 
alone endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may be 
long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them, in French 
revolutions and other terrible ways. 

That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we 
should draw no horoscopes ; that we should expect little, 
for what we expect will not come to pass. Revolutions, 
reformations, — those vast movements into which heroes 
and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they 
were the dawn of the millennium, — have not borne the 
fruit which they looked for. Millenniums are still far 
away. These great convulsions leave the world changed, 
— perhaps improved, but not improved as the actors in 
them hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work 
with less heart, could he have foreseen the Thirty Years' 
War, and in the distance the theology of Tubingen. 
Washincrton mi^ht have hesitated to draw the sword 
against England, could he have seen the country which he 
made as we see it now.-^ 

The most reasonable anticipations fail us, antecedents 
the most apposite mislead us, because the conditions of 
human problems never repeat themselves. Some new feat- 
ure alters every thing, — some element which we detect 
only in its after-operation. 

But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can 
the long records of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, 
its sufferings and its conquests, teach us no more than 
tills ? Let us approach the subject from another side. 

If you were asked to point out the special features in 
1 February, 1864. 



The Science of History. 29 

which Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, 
you would mention perhaps, among others, this, —that his 
stories are not put together, and his characters are not con- 
ceived, to illustrate any particular law or principle. They 
teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above 
another ; and, when we have drawn from them all the di- 
rect instruction which they contain, there remains still 
something unresolved, — something which the artist gives, 
and which the philosopher cannot give. 

It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say 
Shakespeare's supreme tmth lies. He represents real life. 
His dramas teach as life teaches, — neither less nor more. 
He builds his fabrics, as Nature does, on right and wrong; 
but he does not struggle to make Nature more systematic 
than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil ; in 
the unmerited sufferings of innocence ; in the dispropor- 
tion of penalties to desert ; in the seeming blindness with 
which justice, in attempting to assert itself, overwhelms 
innocent and guilty in a common ruin, — Shakespeare is 
true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as 
he finds it ; and, in his most tremendous positions, he is 
addressing rather the intellectual emotions than the un- 
derstanding, — knowing well that the understanding in 
such things is at fault, and the sage as icrnorant as'' the 
child. 

Only the highest order of genius can represent Nature 
thus. An inferior artist produces either something en- 
tirely immoral, where good and evil are names, and nobil- 
ity of disposition is supposed to show itself in the absolute 
disregard of them, or else, if he is a better kind of man, 
he will force on Nature a didactic purpose ; he composes 
what are called moral tales, which may edify the conscience, 
but only mislead the intellect. 

The finest work of this kind produced in modern times 
is Lessing's play of " Nathan the Wise." The object of 
it is to teach religious toleration. The doctrine is admir- 



30 The Science of History. 

able, the mode in which it is enforced is interesting ; but 
it has the fatal fliult that it is not true. Nature does not 
teach religious toleration by'any such direct method ; and 
the result is — no one knew it better than Lessing himself 
— that the play is not poetry, but only splendid manufac- 
ture. Shakespeare is eternal ; Lessing's " Nathan " will 
pass away with the mode of thought which gave it birth. 
One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about 
fact. The theory seems at first sight to contain the most 
immediate instruction ; but it is not really so. 

Gibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakes- 
peare. The French king, in " Lear," was to be got rid of ; 
Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and Lear himself was to be 
rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age. They 
could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of 
Claudius. The wicked king was to die, and the wicked 
mother ; and Hamlet and OiDhelia were to make a match 
of it, and live happily ever after. A common novelist 
would have arranged it thus ; and you would have had your 
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and 
virtue had its due reward, and all would have been Vv'ell. 
But Shakespeare would not have it so. Shakespeare knew 
that crime was not so simple in its consequences, or Prov- 
idence so paternal. He was contented to take the truth 
from life ; and the effect upon the mind of the most cor- 
rect theory of what life ought to be, compared to the effect 
of the life itself, is infinitesimal in comparison. 

Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment 
of remarkable incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of 
them. Look at "Macbeth." You may derive abundant 
instruction from it, — instruction of many kinds. There is 
a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which 
a noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fash- 
ion you may speculate, if you like, on the political condi- 
tions represented there, and the temptation presented in 
absolute monarchies to unscrupulous ambition ; you may 



The Science of History. 31 

sa}', like Doctor Slop, these things could not have happened 
under a constitutional government: or, again, you may- 
take up your parable against 'superstition ; you may dilate 
on the frightful consequences of a belief in witches, and 
reflect on the superior advantages of an age of schools and 
newspapers. If the bare facts of the story had come 
down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of 
the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his 
account, v/e may depend upon it, would have been put to- 
gether upon one or other of these principles. Yet, by the 
side of that unfolding of the secrets of the prison-house 
of the soul, what lean and shriveled anatomies the best of 
such descriptions w^ould seem ! 

Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us 
a theory of what he meant ; he gave us the thing itself, on 
which we might make whatever theories we pleased. 

Or, again, look at Homer. 

The " Iliad " is from two to three thousand years older 
than " Macbeth," and yet it is as fresh as if it had been 
written yesterday. We have there no lesson save in the 
emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer had no 
philosophy ; he never struggles to press upon us his views 
about this or that ; you can scarcely tell, indeed, whether 
his sympathies are Greek or Trojan : but he represents to 
us faithfully the men and women among whom he lived. 
He sang the tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he drained 
the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom 
he was conferring immortality. And thus, although no 
Agamemnon, king of men, ever led a Grecian fleet to 
Ilium ; though no Priam sought the midnight tent of 
Achilles ; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were 
but names, and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's 
power of representing men and women, those old Greeks 
will still stand out from amidst the darkness of the ancient 
world with a sharpness of outline which belongs to no 
period of liistory except the most recent. For the mere 



32 Tlie iScience of History. 

hard purposes of history, the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " are 
the most effective books which ever were written. AVe 
see the hall of Menelaus, we see the garden of Alcinoiis, 
we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we see 
the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the mar- 
ket-place dealing out genial justice. Or, again, when the 
wild mood is on, we can hear the crash of the spears, the 
rattle of the armor as the heroes fall, and the j^lunging of 
the horses among the slain. Could we enter the palace of 
an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there ; we 
know the words in which he would address us. We could 
meet Hector as a friend. If we could choose a companion 
to spend an evening with over a fireside, it would be the 
man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope. 

I am not going into the vexed question whether History 
or Poetry is the more true. It has been sometimes said 
that Poetry is the more true, because it can make things 
more like what our moral sense would prefer they should 
be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature 
and flxct were not just enough. 

I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry at- 
tempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons 
truth, and is false to itself Even literal facts, exactly as 
they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get 
them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, 
wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds 
to have been used ; and it. shows how wisely he was guided 
in this, that those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are 
taken exactly, with no more change than the metre makes 
necessar}^, from Cavendish's Life. Marlborough read 
Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else. 
The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to 
what may be called the accidents of facts. It was enough 
for Shakespeare to know that Prince Hal in his youth had 
lived among loose companions, and the tavern in Eastcheap 
came in to fill out his picture ; although Mrs. Quickly and 



The Science of History. 33 



\ 



Falstaif, and Poins and Bardolph, were more likely to have 
been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mer- 
maid, than to have been comrades of the true Prince 
Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to draw real men, 
and the situation, whatever it might be. would sit easy on 
them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than 
History, — that it can make a picture more complete. It 
may take liberties with time and space, and give the action 
distinctness by throwing it into more manageable compass. 
But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or 
represent life as other than it is. The greatness of the 
poet depends on his being true to Nature, without insisting 
that Nature shall theorize with him, without making her 
more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality ; 
and, in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which 
cannot be explained. 

And if this be true of Poetry — if Homer and Shakes- 
peare are v/hat they are from the absence of every thing 
didactic about them — may we not thus learn something 
of what History should be, and in what sense it should as- 
pire to teach ? 

If Poetry must not theorize, much less should the his- 
torian theorize, whose obligations to be true to fact are 
even greater than the poet's. If the drama is grandest 
when the action is least explicable by laws, because then it 
best resembles life, then history will be grandest also under 
the same conditions. " Macbeth," were it literally true, 
would be perfect history ; and so far as the historian can 
approach to that kind of model, so far as he can let his 
story tell itself in the deeds and words of those who act it 
out, so far is he most successful. His work is no longer 
the vapor of his own brain, which a breath will scatter ; it 
is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A 
thousand theories may be formed about it, — spiritual 
theories, Pantheistic theories, cause and effect theories ; 
but each age will have its own philosophy of history, and 
3 



34 The Science of Ilistort/. 

all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel falls out of date, 
Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time will fall 
out of date ; the thouo^ht about the thinor nmst chancre as 
we change : but the thing itself can never change ; and a 
history is durable or perishable as it contains more or least 
of the writer's own speculations. The splendid intellect of 
Gibbon for the most part kept him true to the right course 
in this ; yet the philosophical chapters for which he has 
been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought 
the least interesting in his work. The time has been w^hen 
they would not have been comprehended : the time may 
come when they will seem commonplace. 

It may be said, that, in requiring history to be written 
like a drama, we require an imiDOssibility. 

For history to be written with the complete form of a 
drama, doubtless is impossible : but there are periods, and 
these the periods, for the most part, of greatest interest to 
mankind, the history of which may be so written that the 
actors shall reveal their characters in their own words ; 
where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the 
great passions of the epoch not simply be described as ex- 
isting, but be exhibited at their white heat in the souls and 
hearts possessed by them. There are all the elements of 
drama — drama of the highest order — where the huge 
forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the 
power of the man is seen either stemming the stream till 
it overwhelms him, ur ruling while he seems to yield to it. 
It is Nature's drama, — not Shakespeare's, but a 
drama none the less. 

So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us 
not be told ahout this man or that. Let us hear the man 
himself speak, let us see him act, and let us be left to 
form our own opinions about him. The historian, we are 
told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He must 
not only lay the facts before them: he must tell them 
what he himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, 



The Science of lliatory, 35 

this is precisely what he ought not to do. Bishop Butler 
says somewhere, that the best book which could be written 
would be a book consisting only of premises, from which 
the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The 
highest poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and 
the highest history ought to be. We should no more ask 
for a theory of this or that period of history, than we 
should ask for a theory of " Macbeth " or " Hamlet." 
Philosophies of history, sciences of history, — all these 
there will continue to be : the fashions of them will 
change, as our habits of thought will change ; each new 
philosopher will find his chief employment in showing that 
before him no one understood any thing ; but the drama 
of history is imperishable, and the lessons of it will be like 
what we learn from Homer or Shakespeare, — lessons for 
which we have no words. 

The address of history is less to the understanding than 
to the higher emotions. We learn in it to sympathize with 
what is great and good ; we learn to hate what is base. 
In the anomalies of fortune we feel the mystery of our 
mortal existence ; and in the companionship of the illustri- 
ous natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we 
escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of 
common life, and our minds are tuned in a higher and 
nobler key. 

For the rest, and for those large questions which I 
touched in connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times 
of disintegration, and none can tell what will be after us. 
What opinions, what convictions, the infant of to-day 
will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live out to- 
gether to the middle of another century, only a very bold 
man would undertake to conjecture. " The time will 
come," said Lichtenberg, in scorn at the materializing tend- 
encies of modern thought, — " the time will come when the 
belief in God will be as the tales with which old women 
frighten children ; when the world will be a machine, the 



36 The Science of History. 

ether a gas, and God will be a force." Mankind, if they 
last long enough on the earth, may develop strange things 
out of themselves ; and the growth of what is called the 
Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on Lichten- 
berg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years 
hence, or seven hundred, — be the close of the mortal his- 
tory of humanity as far distant in the future as its shadowy 
beginnings seem now to lie behind us, — this only we may 
foretell with confidence, — that the riddle of man's nature 
will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which 
physical laws will fail to explain, — that something, what- 
ever it be, in himself and in the world, which science can- 
not fathom, and which suggests the unknown possibilities 
of his origin and his destiny. There will remain yet 

" Those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things ; 
Falling from us, vanishings ; 
Blank misgivings of a creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized ; 
High instincts, before which our mortal nature 
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised." 

There will remain 

" Those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, — 
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing, — 
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the Eternal Silence." 



TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHEE; 

THREE LECTURES DELIVERED AT NEWCASTLE, 1867. 

LECTURE I. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, — I do not know whether I 
have made a very wise selection in the subject which I 
have chosen for these Lectures. There was a time — a 
time which, measured by the years of our national life, was 
not so very long ago — when the serious thoughts of man- 
kind were occupied exclusively by religion and politics. 
The small knowledge which they possessed of other things 
was tinctured by their speculative opinions on the relations 
of heaven and earth ; and, down to the sixteenth century, 
art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in this coun- 
try, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theol- 
ogy. Philosophers — such philosophers as there were — 
obtained and half deserved the reputation of quacks and 
conjurors. Astronomy was confused with astrology. The 
physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless, unless 
the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the 
ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally 
bishops ; even the fighting business was not entirely secu- 
lar. Half a dozen Scotch prelates were killed at Flodden ; 
and, late in the reign of Henry the Eighth, no fitter person 
could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of Coventry, to 
take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the free- 
booters of Llangollen. 

Every single department of intellectual or practical life 



38 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

was penetrated with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the 
interests, of the clergy ; and thus it was that, when differ- 
ences of religious opinion arose, they split society to its 
foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated everywhere, 
and there were no subjects whatever in which those who 
disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. 
When men quarreled, they quarreled altogether. The 
disturbers of settled beliefs were regarded as public ene- 
mies who had placed themselves beyond the pale of human- 
ity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like wild 
beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion. 

Three centuries have passed over our heads since the 
time of which I am speaking, and the world is so changed 
that we can hardly recognize it as the same. 

The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a 
thousand lines ; and men of science of all creeds can pur- 
sue side by side their common investigations. Catholics, 
Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Calvinists, contend 
with each other in honorable rivalry in arts and literature 
and commerce and industry. They read the same books. 
They study at the same academies. They have seats in 
the same senates. They preside together on the judicial 
bench, and carry on, without jar or difference, the ordinary 
business of the country. 

Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite 
of themselves into sympathy and good-will. When they 
are in harmony in so large a part of their occupations, the 
points of remaining difference lose their venom. Those 
who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find 
themselves friends ; and, as far as it affects the world at 
large, the acrimony of controversy has almost disappeared. 

Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for 
a speculative theological opinion. You feel at once, that, in 
the most bigoted country in the world, such a thing has 
become impossible ; and the impossibility is the measure 
of the alteration which we have all undergone. The formu- 



Times of Erasmus and Luther, 39 

las remain as they were o« either side, — the very same 
formulas which were once supposed to require these de- 
testable murders. But we have learned to know each 
other better. The cords which bind together the brother- 
hood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We 
do not any more fly apart or become enemies because, 
here and there, in one strand out of so many, there are 
still unsound places. 

If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was im- 
proving and not retrograding, I should find it in this phe- 
nomenon. It has not been brought about by controversy. 
Men are fighting still over the same questions which they 
began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant 
divines have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor 
Catholics Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own 
partisans, and makes no impression on his adversary. 

Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitter- 
ness ; and that, I suspect, is all that it would accomplish if 
it continued till the day of judgment. I sometimes, in im- 
patient moments, wish the laity in Europe would treat their 
controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated their 
seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel 
without knowing what they were quarreling about. 

As the principals were being led up to their places, one 
of them whispered to the other, " If you will shoot your 
second, I will shoot mine." 

The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, 
is no tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the 
healthy, silent, spontaneous growth of a nobler order of 
conviction, which has conquered our prejudices even before 
we knew that they were assailed. This better spirit espe- 
cially is represented in institutions like this, which acknowl- 
edge no dijEferences of creed, which are constructed on 
the broadest principles of toleration, and which, there- 
fore, as a rule, are wisely protected from the intrusion of 
discordant subjects. 



40 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not 
to divide them, — to enable us to share together in those 
topics of universal interest and instruction which all can 
take pleasure in, and which give offence to none. 

If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a 
practice which I admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall 
give you rather a lame answer. I might say that I know 
more about the history of the sixteenth century than I knoAv 
about any thing else. I have spent the best years of my 
life in reading and writing about it ; and if I have any thing 
to tell you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject. 

Or, again, I might say — which is indeed most true — 
that to the Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best 
of those very influences which I have been describing. 
The Reformation broke the theolog^ical shackles in Avhich 
men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and so 
gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without know- 
ing what they were about, taught the lesson of religious 
toleration. They attempted to supersede one set of dog- 
mas by another. They succeeded with half the v/orld ; 
they failed with the other half. In a little while it became 
apparent that good men, without ceasing to be ■ good, 
could think differently about theology ; and that goodness, 
therefore, depended on something else than the holding 
orthodox opinions. 

It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am 
going to talk to you about Martin Luther ; nor is tolera- 
tion of differences and opinion, however excellent it be, 
the point on which I shall dwell in these Lectures. 

Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I 
for one should not have meddled with it, either here or 
anywhere. I hold that, on the obscure mysteries of fliith, 
every one should be allowed to believe, according to his 
conscience, and that arguments on such matters are either 
impertinent or useless. 

But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 41 

opinions, was a historical fact, — an objective something 
which may be studied like any of the facts of nature. 
The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who 
played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the 
world. If we except the Apostles, no body of human 
beings ever printed so deep a mark into the organization 
of society ; and, if there be any value or meaning in his- 
tory at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such 
men as these can be matters of indifference to none of us. 

We have not to do with a story which is buried in ob- 
scure antiquity. The facts admit of being learnt. The 
truth, whatever it was, concerns us all equally. If the di- 
visions created by that great convulsion are ever to be ob- 
literated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see 
the thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or 
imaginative version of the thing, such as from our own 
point of view we like to think it was. Fiction in such 
matters may be convenient for our immediate theories, but 
it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We may make 
our own opinions, but facts were made for us ; and, if we 
evade or deny them, it will be the worse for us. 

Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very 
largely preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the 
Reformation, and you find a picture of the world given 
over to a lying tyranny, the Christian population of Eu- 
rope enslaved by a corrupt and degraded priesthood, and 
the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to 
the rescue like anj^els of liorht. All is black on one side ; 
all is fair and beautiful on the other. 

Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the 
same men, and we have before us the Church of the 
Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed mission in the saving of 
human souls. Satan a second time enters into Paradise, 
and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man 
to his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he 
aspires after forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy 



42 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

breaks loose. The seamless robe of the Saviour is rent in 
pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation of fiends. 

Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it ; facts, 
characters, circumstances, are melted in the theological 
crucible, and cast in moulds diametrically opjDosite. Noth- 
ing remains the same except the names and dates. Each 
side chooses its own vi^itnesses. Exery thing is credible 
which makes for what it calls the truth. Every thing is 
made false which will not fit into its place. " Blasphemous 
fables " is the usual expression in Protestant controversial 
books for the accounts given by Catholics. " Protestant 
tradition," says an eminent modern Catholic, " is based on 
lying, — bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying." 

Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of 
the matter different from both these, if we could only get 
at it, and it will be an excellent thing for the world when 
that human account can be made out. I am not so pre- 
sumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less 
can you expect me to try to do so within the compass of 
two or three lectures. If I cannot do every thing, however, 
I believe I can do a little ; at any rate, I can give you a 
sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence in, of 
the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation 
began. I will not expose myself more than I can heljD to 
the censure of the divine who was so hard on Protestant 
tradition. Most of what I shall have to say to you this 
evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics 
themselves, or from official records earlier than the out- 
break of the controversy, when there was no temptation to 
pervert the truth. 

Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require 
accurate information. If all was going on well, the Re- 
formers really and truly told innumerable lies, and deserve 
all the reprobation which we can give them. If all was 
not going on well, — if, so far from being well, the Church 
was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer, — 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 43 

then clearly a Refoimation was necessary of some kind ; 
and we have taken one step towards a fair estimate of the 
persons concerned in it. 

A fair estimate, — that, and only that, is what we want. 
I need hardly observe to you, that opinion in England has 
been undergoing lately a very considerable alteration about 
these persons. 

Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked 
upon as little less than saints : now a party has risen up 
■who intend, as they frankly tell us, to un -Protestantize the 
Church of England ; who detest Protestantism as a kind of 
infidelity ; who desire simply to reverse every thing which 
the Reformers did. 

One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of 
Luther, called him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked 
with — w^iom do you think ? Joe Smith the Mormon 
Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther, — that is the combina- 
tion with which we are now presented. 

The book in which this remarkable statement appeared 
was presented by two bishops to the Upper House of Con- 
vocation. It was received with gracious acknowledcrments 
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed solemnly 
in the library of reference, for that learned body to con- 
sult. 

So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of 
Luther as a Philistine, — a " Philistine " meaning an op- 
pressor of the chosen people ; the enemy of men of culture, 
of intelligence, such as the professor himself. 

One notices these things, not as of much importance in 
themselves, but as showing which way the stream is run- 
ning ; and, curiously enough, in quite another direction we 
may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal philosophers, 
men of high literary power and reputation, looking into 
the history of Luther and Calvin and John Knox and 
the rest, find them falling far short of the philosophic ideal, 
— wanting sadly in many qualities which the liberal mind 



44 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

cannot dispense with. They are discovered to be intoler- 
ant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to persecute Cath- 
olics as Catholics had persecuted them ; to be, in fact, little 
if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they 
were fighting against. 

Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough 
to express his contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. 
Buckle places Cranmer by the side of Bonner, and hesi- 
tates which of the two characters is the more detestable. 

An unfavorable estimate of the Reformers, whether just 
or unjust, is unquestionably gaining ground among our ad- 
vanced thinkers. A greater man than either Macaulay or 
Buckle — the German poet, Goethe — says of Luther, 
that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind 
for centuries, by calling in the passions of the multitude 
to decide on subjects which ought to have been left to the 
learned. Goethe, in saying this, was alluding especially to 
Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men like 
Erasmus, had struck upon the right track ; and, if they could 
have retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there 
would have been more truth, and less falsehood, amonor us 
at this present time. The party hatreds, the theological 
rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars, the religious an- 
imosities, which have so long distracted us, would have 
been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have ex- 
panded gradually and equally with the growth of knowl- 
edge. 

Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to 
be lightly passed over. It will be my endeavor to show 
you what kind of man Erasmus was, what he was aiming 
at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his work, 
ijf " spoiling " is the word which we are to use for it. 

One caution, however, I must in fairness give you be- 
fore w^e proceed further. It lies upon the face of the story 
that the Reformers imperfectly understood toleration ; but 
you must keep before you the spirit and temper of the 



Times of Erasmus and Luther, 45 

men with whom they had to deal. For themselves, when 
the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to 
think and speak their own way. They never dreamed of 
interfering with others, although they were quite aware 
that others, when they could, were likely to interfere with 
them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cran- 
mer was working all his life with the prospect of being 
burnt alive as his reward ; and, as we all know, he actu- 
ally was burnt alive. 

When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in 
the Netherlands, before one single Catholic had been ill- 
treated there, before a symptom of a mutinous disposition 
had shown itself among the people, an edict was issued by 
the authorities for the suppression of the new opinions. 

The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you. 

The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed 
that they were to hold and believe the doctrines of the 
Holy Roman Catholic Church. " Men and women," says 
the edict, " who disobey this command shall be punished 
as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen 
into heresy shall be buried alive. Men, if they recant, 
shall lose their heads. If they continue obstinate, they 
shall be burnt at the stake. 

" If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall 
shelter or protect him or her ; and no stranger shall be 
admitted to lodge in any inn or dwelling-house unless he 
bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from the priest 
of his parish. 

" The Inquisition shall inquire into the private opinions 
of every person, of whatever degree ; and all officers of all 
kinds shall assist the Inquisition at their peril. Those who 
know where heretics are concealed shall denounce them, 
or they shall suffer as heretics themselves. Heretics " (ob- 
serve the malignity of this paragraph), — " heretics who 
will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be 
pardoned if they will promise to conform for the future." 



46 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than 
fifty thousand human beings, first and last, were deliber- 
ately murdered. And, gentlemen, I must say that pro- 
ceedings of this kind explain and go far to excuse the sub- 
sequent intolerance of Protestants. 

Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a 
Protestant than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I 
understand it, is the intolerance of such an edict as that 
which I have read to you, — the unprovoked intolerance of 
difference of opinion. 1 conceive that the most enlight- 
ened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow- 
minded if he had suffered under the administration of the 
Duke of Alva. 

Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with 
my subject. 

Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, 
never that we know of, have mankind thrown out of 
themselves any thing so grand, so useful, so beautiful, as 
the Catholic Church once was. In these times of Qurs, 
well-regulated selfishness is the recognized rule of action ; 
every one of us is expected to look out first for himself, 
and take care of his own interests. At the time I speak 
of, the Church ruled the State with the authority of a con- 
science ; and self-interest, as a motive of action, was only 
named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were re- 
garded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the 
Almighty ; and they seem to me to have really deserved 
that high estimate of their character. It was not for the 
doctrines which they taught, only or chiefly, that they were 
held in honor. Brave men do not fall down before their 
fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the 
rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, 
nobleness, purity, high-mindedness, — these are the quali- 
ties before which the free-born races of Europe have been 
contented to bow ; and in no order of men were such qual- 
ities to be found as they were found six hundred years 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 47 

ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called 
themselves the successors of the Apostles. They claimed 
in their Master's name universal spiritual authority, but 
they made good their pretensions by the holiness of their 
own . lives. They were allowed to rule because they de- 
served to rule, and, in the fullness of reverence, kings and 
nobles bent before a power which was nearer to God than 
their own. Over prince and subject, chieftain and ^erf, a 
body of unarmed, defenseless men reigned supreme by the 
magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern war- 
riors who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They 
taught them — they brought them really and truly to 
believe — that they had immortal souls, and that they 
would one day stand at the awful judgment-bar and give 
account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, 
and the good ; with those who had not oppressed the 
poor nor removed their neighbor's landmark ; with those 
w^ho had been just in all their dealings ; with those who* 
had fought against evil, and had tried valiantly to do their 
Master's wnll, — at that great day, it would be wgll. For 
cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and 
pleasure and self4ndulgence, there was the blackness of 
eternal death. 

An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy 
had eifectually instilled into the mind of Europe. It was 
not a TERHAPS ; it was a certainty. It was not a form of 
words repeated once a week at church ; it was an assur- 
ance entertained on all days and in all places, without any 
particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life 
and conscience was simply immeasurable. 

I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They 
were very far from perfect at the best of times, and the 
European nations were never completely submissive to 
them. It would not have been well if they had been. 
The business of human creatures in this planet is not 
summed up in the most excellent of priestly catechisms. 



48 Times of Erasmus and LutJier. 

The world and its concerns continued to interest men, 
though priests insisted on their nothingness. They could 
not prevent kings from quarreling with each other. They 
could not hinder disputed successions and civil feuds and 
wars and political conspiracies. • What they did do was 
to shelter the weak from the strong. In the eyes of the 
clergy, the serf and his lord stood on the common level 
of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no 
passport. They were themselves for the most part chil- 
dren of the people ; and the son of the artisan or peasant 
rose to the mitre and the triple crown, just as nowadays 
the rail-siDlitter and the tailor become Presidents of the 
Republic of the West. 

The Church was essentially democratic, while at the 
same time it had the monopoly of learning ; and all the 
secular power fell to it which learning, combined with 
sanctity and assisted by superstition, can bestow. 

The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They 
were not amenable to the common laws of the land. 
While they governed the laity, the laity had no power over 
them. From the throne downwards, every secular office 
was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sov- 
ereign till the Church placed the crown upon his head ; 
and what the Church bestowed, the Church claimed the 
right to take away. The disposition of property was in 
their hands. No will could be proved except before the 
bishop or his officer ; and no will was held valid if the 
testator died out of communion. There were magistrates 
and courts of law for the offenses of the laity. If a priest 
committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The civil 
power could not touch him ; he was reserved for his ordi- 
nary. Bishops' commissaries sat in town and city, taking 
cognizance of the moral conduct of every man and woman. 
Offenses against life and property were tried here in Eng- 
land, as now, by the common law ; but the Church courts 
dealt with sins — sins of word or act. If a man was a 



Times of JErasmus and Luther. 49 

profligate or a drunkard ; if he lied or swore ; if he did not 
come to communion, or held unlawful opinions ; if he was 
idle or unthrifty ; if he was unkind to his wife or his ser- 
vants ; if a child was disobedient to his father, or a father 
cruel to his child ; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares, 
or used false measures or dishonest weights, — the eye of 
the parish priest was everywhere, and the Church court 
stood always open to examine and to punish. 

Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been ! 
Yet it existed generally in Catholic Europe down to the 
eve of the Reformation. It could never have established 
itself at all unless at one time it had worked beneficially, 
as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes of the 
Church's fall. 

I know nothing in English history much more striking 
than the answer given by Archbishop Warham to the com- 
plaints of the English House of Commons after the fall of 
Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons complained 
that the clergy made laws in Convocation, which the laity 
were excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws 
made by the clergy, the Commons said, were often at 
variance with the laws of the realm. 

What did Warham reply ? He said he was sorry for the 
alleged discrepancy ; but, inasmuch as the lavv's made by 
the clergy were always in conformity with the will of God, 
the laws of the realm had only to be altered, and then the 
difficulty would vanish. 

What must have been the position of the clergy in the 
fullness of their power, when they could speak thus on the 
eve of their prostration ? You have only to look from a 
distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city, and you will 
see in a moment the mediaeval relations between Church 
and State. The cathedral is the city. The first object you 
catch sight of as you approach is the spire tapering into the 
sky, or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of 
the landscape, majestically beautiful, imposing by mere 
4 



50 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go 
nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you more 
and more. The puny dwelling-places of the citizens creep 
at its feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the 
sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes the 
twilight is darkening. And even now, when the towns are 
thrice their ancient size, and the houses have stretched 
upwards from two stories to five ; when the great chimneys 
are vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples 
of modern industry — the workshops and the factories — 
spread their long fronts before the eye, — the cathedral is 
still the governing form in the picture, the one object which 
possesses the imagination and refuses to be eclipsed. 

As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church 
of the Middle Ages to the secular institutions of the world. 
Its very neighborhood was sacred ; and its shadow, like the 
shadow of the Apostles, was a sanctuary. When I look at 
the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see in them a 
type of the change which has passed over us. The House 
of Commons of the Plantagenets sat in the Chapter House 
of Westminster Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform 
Bill, five and thirty years ago, debated in St. Stephen's 
Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by the side 
of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's 
ashes, the proud minster itself is dwarfed into insignifi- 
cance. 

Let us turn to another vast feature of the Middle Ages ; 
I mean the monasteries. 

Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has 
lived or died at a particular spot. He has been dis- 
tinguished by his wisdom, by his piety, by his active benev- 
olence ; and, in an age when conjurors and witches were 
supposed to be helped by the Devil to do evil, he, on his 
part, has been thought to have possessed in larger measure 
than common men the favor and the grace of Heaven. 
Blessed influences hang about the spot which he has hal- 



Times of Uras7nus and Luther. 51 

lowed by his presence. His relics — his household posses- 
sions, his books, his clothes, his bones — retain the shadowy- 
sanctity which they received in having once belonged to 
him. We all set a value, not wholly unreal, on any thing 
which has been the property of a remarkable man. At 
worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence. 

"Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, 
so in the Middle Ages they built shrines or chapels on the 
spots which saints had made holy ; and communities of pious 
people gathered together there — beginning with the per- 
sonal friends the saint had left behind him — to try to live 
as he had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to 
die as he had died. Thus arose religious fraternities, — 
companies of men who desired to devote themselves to 
goodness, to give up pleasure and amusement and self- 
indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works 
of charity. 

These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The 
monks, as the brotherhoods were called, were organized in 
different orders, with some variety of rule, but the broad 
principle was the same in all. They were to live for others, 
not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that they 
might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They 
took vows of chastity, that the care of a family might not 
distract them from the work which they had undertaken. 
Their efforts of charity were not limited to this world. 
Their days were spent in hard bodily labor, in study, or 
in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone 
floors of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to 
Heaven, interceding for the poor souls who were suffering 
in purgatory. 

The world, as it always will, paid honor to exceptional 
excellence. The system spread to the furthest limits of 
Christendom. The religious houses became places of ref- 
uge, where men of noble birth, kings and queens and 
emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their 



52 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with 
whom the world had dealt hardly, or those whom it had 
surfeited with its unsatisfying pleasures, those who were 
disappointed with earth, and those who were filled with 
passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven 
of rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came 
to them and wealth and social dignity, — all gratefully 
extended to men who deserved so w^ell of their fellows ; 
while no landlords were more popular than they, for the 
sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well as 
themselves. 

Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the 
wildest parts of it innumerable remains of religious houses, 
which had grown up among a people who acknowledged no 
rule among themselves except the sword, and where every 
chief made war upon his neighbor as the humor seized 
him. The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as 
defenseless as sheep among the wolves ; but the wolves 
spared them for their character. In such a country as 
Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived 
for a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which 
surrounded them. 

Of authority, the religious orders were practically inde- 
pendent. They were amenable only to the Pope and to 
their own superiors. Here in England, the king could not 
send a commissioner to inspect a monastery, nor even send 
a policeman to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter 
within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as 
they were, found their authority cease when they entered 
the gates of a Benedictine or Dominican abbey. 

So utterly have times changed that with your utmost 
exertions you will hardly be able to picture to yourselves 
the Catholic Church in the days of its greatness. Our 
school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany held 
the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his 
mule ; how our own English Henry Plantagenet walked 



Times of M-asmus and Luther. 53 

barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, and knelt in 
the Chapter House for the monks to flog him. The first 
of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the 
Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, 
and not romances ; and you may form some notion from 
them how high in the world's eyes the Church must have 
stood. 

And be sure it did not achieve that proud position with- 
out deserving it. The Teutonic and Latin princes were 
not credulous fools ; and, when they submitted, it was to 
something stronger than themselves, — stronger in limb and 
muscle, or stronger in intellect and character. 

So the Church was in its vigor : so the Church was riot 
at the opening of the sixteenth century. Power, wealth, 
security, — men are more than mortal if they can resist the 
temptations to which too much of these expose them. Nor 
were they the only enemies which undermined the energies 
of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to re- 
mind us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. 
So far as they do this, they fulfill their end, and are honored 
in fulfilling it. It would have been better for all of us, — 
it would be better for us now, — could churches keep this 
theii^ peculiar function steadily and singly before them. 
Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the spec- 
ulative side of things to the practical. They take up into 
their teaching opinions "and theories which are merely 
ephemeral ; which would naturally die out with the prog- 
ress of knowledge, but, having received a spurious sanc- 
tity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first 
unmeaning, and then occasions of suj^erstition. 

It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English 
or Latin, so that what is present to my mind is the thought 
which the words express, and not the words themselves. 
In these and all languages it is the most beautiful of prayers. 
But you know that people came to look on a Latin pater- 
noster as the most powerful of spells, — potent in heaven, 



54 Times of Erasmus a7id Luther. 

if said straightforward ; if repeated backward, a rharm 
which no spirit in hell could resist. 

So it is, in my opinion, with all forms, — forms of words, 
or forms of ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning 
is alive in them, they are not only harmless, but pregnant 
and life-giving. When we come to think that they possess 
in themselves material and magical virtues, then the pur- 
pose which they answer is to hide God from us, and make 
us practically into Atheists. 

This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the 
Catholic Church in the generations which preceded Luther. 
The body remained ; the mind was gone away : the origi- 
nal thought which its symbolism represented was no longer 
credible to intelligent persons. 

The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when 
men went to mass they spoke of it as going to a comedy. 
You may have heard the story of Luther in his younger 
days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing his fel- 
low-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist, 
" Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain." 

Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these j 
the rest repeated the words of the service, conceiving that 
they were working a charm. Religion was passing through 
the transformation which all religions have a tendency to 
undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy 
life ; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, 
and escape the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is 
dispensed with if men will diligently profess certain opin- 
ions, or punctually perform certain external duties. How- 
ever scandalous the moral life, the participation of a par- 
ticular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the 
moment of death, is held to clear the score. 

The powers which had been given to the clergy required 
for their exercise the highest wisdom and the highest prob- 
ity. They had fallen at last into the hands of men who 
possessed considerably less of these qualities than the laity 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 55 

whom they undertook to govern. They had degraded their 
conceptions of God ; and, as a necessary consequence, they 
had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. 
The aspirations after sanctity liad disappeared, and instead 
of them there remained the practical reality of the five 
senses. The high prelates, the cardinals, the great abbots, 
were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendor and 
luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their 
superiors with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser 
pleasures ; while their spiritual powers, their supposed au- 
thority in this world and the next, were turned to account 
to obtain from the laity the means for their self-indulgence. 

The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but 
the Church was ready with dispensations for those who 
could afford to pay for them. The Church forbade mar- 
riage to the fourth degree of consanguinity; but loving 
cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain 
tlie Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates 
for the priests at every halting-place on the road of life, — 
fees at weddings, fees at funerals, fees whenever an excuse 
could be found to fasten them. Even when a man was 
dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or death 
present was exacted of his family. 

And then those Bishops' Courts, of which I spoke just 
now, — they were founded for the discipline of morality ; 
they were made the instruments of the most detestable ex- 
tortion. If an impatient layman spoke a disrespectful word 
of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's commissary 
and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, 
and excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a 
poor wretch was under the ban of the Church, no trades- 
man might sell him clothes or food, no friend might re- 
lieve him, no human voice might address him, under pain 
of the same sentence ; and, if he died unreconciled, he died 
like a dog, -svnthout the sacraments, and was refused Chris- 
tian burial. 



^6 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

The records of some of these courts survive ; a glance 
at their pages will show the principles on which they were 
worked. When a layman offended, the single object was 
to make him pay for it. The magistrates could not pro- 
tect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so 
much the better, for they were now all in the scrape to- 
gether. The next step would be to indict them in a body 
for heresy ; and then, of course, there was nothing for it 
but to give way, and compound for absolution by money. 

It was money, ever money. Even in case of real de- 
linquency, it was still money. Money, not charity, covered 
the multitude of sins. 

I have told you that the clergy v>^ere exempt from secular 
jurisdiction. They claimed to be amenable only to spirit- 
ual judges, and they extended the broad fringe of their 
order till the word " clerk " was construed to mean any one 
who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. 
A robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that 
he possessed either of these qualifications, and he was al- 
lowed what was called benefit of clergy. His case was 
transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an easy judge, who 
allowed him at once to compound. 

Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As relig- 
ious instructors, they appear in colors if possible less at- 
tractive. 

Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning 
of the sixteentli century was a very simple affair. I am 
not going to speak of the mysterious doctrines of the Cath- 
olic Church. The creed which it professed in its schools 
and theological treatises was the same which it professes 
now, and which it had professed at the time when it was 
most powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the 
formulas in which men express their belief are of much 
consequence. The question is rather of the thing ex- 
pressed ; and so long as we find a living consciousness that 
above the world and above human life there is a righteous 



Times of Erasmus and Liitlier. 57 

God. who will judge men according to their works, whether 
they say their prayers in Latin or English, whether they 
call themselves Protestants or call themselves Catholics, 
appears to me of quite secondary importance. But, at the 
time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The 
formulas and ceremonies were all in all ; and of God it is 
hard to say what conceptions men had formed when they 
believed that a dead man's relations could buy him out 
of purgatory — buy him out of purgatory, for this was the 
literal truth — by hiring priests to sing masses for his soul. 

Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the 
keys of the other world were held by the clergy. If a man 
confessed regularly to his priest, received the sacrament, 
and was absolved, then all was well with him. His duties 
consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he com- 
mitted sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be 
commuted for money. If he was sick, or ill at ease in his 
mind, he was recommended a pilgrimage, — a pilgrimage to 
a shrine or a holy well, or to some wonder-working image, 
where, for due consideration, his case would be attended to. 
It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of 
the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in vSax- 
ony there was an image of a Virgin and Child. If the 
worshiper came to it with a good, handsome offering, the 
child bowed and was gracious ; if the pjesent was unsatis- 
factory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favors till 
the purse-strings were untied again. 

There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at 
Boxley, in Kent, where the pilgrims went in thousands. 
This figure used to bow, too, when it was pleased ; and a 
good sum of money was sure to secure its good-v/ill. 

When the Reformation came, and the police looked into 
the matter, the images were found to be worked with wires 
and pulleys. The German lady was kept as a curiosity in 
the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our Boxley rood 
was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was after- 
wards torn in pieces by the people. 



68 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

Nor here again was death the limit of extortion : death 
was rather the gate of the sphere which the clergy made 
peculiarly their own. When a man died, his friends were 
naturally anxious for the fate of his soul. If he died in 
communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had 
not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. 
Therefore he was in purgatory, — • Purgatory Pickpurse, as- 
our English Latimer called it, — and a priest, if properly 
paid, could get him out. 

To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular pro- 
fession, in which, with little trouble, a man could earn a 
comfortable living. He had only to be ordained and to 
learn by heart a certain form of words, and that was all the 
equipment necessary for him. The masses M^ere paid for 
at so much a dozen, and, for every mass that was said, so 
many years were struck off from the penal period. Two 
priests were sometimes to be seen muttering away at the 
opposite ends of the same altar, like a couple of musical 
boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the same 
time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what 
they wanted. If they got the masses, and the priests got 
the money, all parties concerned were satisfied. 

I am speaking of the form which these things assumed 
in an age of degradation and ignorance. The truest and 
wisest words ever spoken by man might be abused in the 
same way. The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' 
Creed, if recited mechanically, and relied on to work a 
mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously idolatrous. 

You can see something of the same kind in a milder 
form in Spain at the present day. The Spaniards, all of 
them, high and low, are expected to buy annually a Pope's 
Bula or Bull, — a small pardon, or indulgence, or plenary 
remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is 
a little obscure; the high authorities themselves do not 
universally agree about them, except so far as to say that 
they are of prodigious value of some sort. The orthodox 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 59 

explanation, I believe, is something of this kind : With every 
sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. 
The pardon cannot touch the guilt ; but when the guilt is 
remitted, there is still the penalty. I may ruin my health 
by a dissolute life ; I may repent of my dissoluteness and 
be forgiven ; but the bad health will remain. For bad 
health substitute penance in this world and purgatory in 
the next ; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect. 

Such as they are, at any rate, every body in Spain has 
these bulls ; you buy them in the shops for a shilling 
apiece. 

This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a 
Spanish church you will see hanging on t\\Q wall an intima- 
tion that whoever will pray so many hours before a partic- 
ular image shall receive full forgiveness of his sins. Hav- 
ing got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied ; but 
no : if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a 
hundred years of purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. 
In one place I remember obsemng that for a very little 
trouble a man could escape a hundred and fifty thousand 
years of purgatory. 

What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will 
be lucky if he is admitted into purgatory at all ! 

Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board 
like the notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. 
On particular days it is taken out and hung up in the 
church, and little would a stranger, ignorant of the lan- 
guage, guess the tremendous meaning of that commonplace 
appearance. On these boards is written, " Hoy se sacan 
animas," — " This day, souls are taken out of purgatory." 
It is an intimation to every one with a friend in distress 
that now is his time. You put a shilling in a plate, you 
give your friend's name, and the thing is done. One won- 
ders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily, any poor 
wretch is left to suffer there. 

Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, 



60 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

the money asked and given is trifling, and probably no one 
concerned in the business believes much about it. They 
serve to show, however, on a small scale, what once went 
on on an immense scale ; and even such as they are, pious 
Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not 
venture to say much on the subject directly, but they al- 
low themselves a certain good-humored ridicule. A Span- 
ish novelist of some reputation tells a story of a man com- 
ing to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a shilling 
in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend. 

" Is my friend's soul out ? " he asked. The priest said it 
was. " Quite sure ? " the man asked. " Quite sure," the 
priest answered. " Very well," said the man, " if he is out 
of purgatory they will not put him in again : it is a bad 
shilling." 

Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are 
worst in their degradation, was the condition of the mon- 
asteries. I am here on delicate ground. The accounts 
of those institutions, as they existed in England and Ger- 
many at the time of their suppression, is so shocking that 
even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports 
which have come down to us. The laity, we are told, de- 
termined to appropriate the abbey lands, and maligned the 
monks to justify the spoliation. Were the .charge true, 
the religious orders would still be without excuse, for the 
whole education of the country was in the hands of the 
clergy ; and they had allowed a whole generation to grow 
up, which, on this hypothesis, was utterly depraved. 

But no such theory can explain away the accumulated 
testimony which comes to us — exactly alike — from so 
many sides and witnesses. We are not dependent upon 
evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the 
reign of our Henry the Seventh, the notorious corruption 
of some of the great abbeys in England brought them un- 
der the notice of the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, 
Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to meddle with 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 61 

them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers 
from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the 
nei<>-hborhood of London ; and the most maliornant Protest- 
ant never drew such a picture of profligate brutality as 
Cardinal Morton left behind him in his Register, in a de- 
scription of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot, in 
a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it con- 
tains. The monks were bound to celibacy, — that is to say, 
they were not allowed to marry. They were full-fed, idle, 
and sensual ; of sin they thought only as something ex- 
tremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another 
with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash 
their faces in a basin. And there I must leave the matter. 
Any body who is curious for particulars may see the origi- 
nal account in Morton's Register, in the archbishop's 
library at Lambeth. 

A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Ger- 
many a book, now called by Catholics an infamous libel, 
the " Epistolag Obscurorum Virorum." " The obscure men," 
supposed to be the writers of these epistles, are monks or 
students of theology. The letters themselves are written 
in dog-Latin, — a burlesque of the language in which ec- 
clesiastical people then addressed each other. They are 
sketches, satirical but not malignant, of the moral and in- 
tellectual character of these reverend personages. 

On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the 
matter I am still obliged to be silent ; but I can give you 
a few specimens of the furniture of the theological minds, 
and of the subjects with which they were occupied. 

A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of dis- 
tress because he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook 
him for a doctor of divinity ; and, on the whole, he fears he 
has committed mortal sin. Can the father absolve him ? 
Can the bishop absolve him ? Can the Pope absolve him ? 
His case seems utterly desperate. 

Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which 



62 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

was argued for four days at the School of Logic at Lou- 
vaine. A certain Master of Arts had taken out his degree 
at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Padua, 
and four other universities. He was thus a member of ten 
universities. But how could a man be a member of ten 
universities ? A university was a body, and one body might 
have many members ; but how one member could have 
many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a monstrous 
anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universi- 
ties the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave 
and learned corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas 
himself could not make himself into the body of ten uni- 
versities. 

The more the learned men argued, the deeper they 
floundered, and at length gave up the problem in despair. 

Again : a certain professor argues that Julius Caesar 
could not have written the book which passes under the 
name of " Caesar's Commentaries," because that book is 
written in Latin, and Latin is a diflicult language ; and a 
man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has noto- 
riously no time to learn Latin. 

Here is another fellow — a monk this one — describing 
to a friend the wonderful things which he has seen in 
Rome. 

" You may have heard," he says, " how the Pope did pos- 
sess a monstrous beast called an Elephant. The Pope did 
entertain for this beast a very great affection, and now, be- 
hold ! it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope called his doc- 
tors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, ' If it be 
possible, heal my elephant.' Then they gave the elephant 
a purge, which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not 
avail, and so the beast departed ; and the Pope grieves 
much for his elephant, for it was indeed a miraculous beast, 
^with a long, long, prodigious long nose ; and when it saw 
the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terri- 
ble voice, ' Bar, bar, bar ! ' " 



Times of Erasmus and Luther, 63 

I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, espe- 
cially as I cannot give you the really characteristic parts 
of the book. 

I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More 
says of it, and nobody will question that Sir Thomas More 
was a good Catholic and a competent witness. "These 
epistles," he says, " are the delight of every one. The wise 
enjoy the wit ; the blockheads of monks take them seri- 
ously, and believe that they have been written to do them 
honor. When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the 
style, which they admit to be comical. But they think the 
style is made up for by the beauty of the sentiment. The 
scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it is di- 
vine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the 
jest for themselves in a hundred years." 

Well might Erasmus exclaim, " What fungus could be 
more stupid ? Yet these are the Atlases who are to uphold 
the tottering Church ! " 

" The monks had a pleasant time of it," says Luther. 
" Every brother had two cans of beer and a quart of wine 
for his supper, with gingerbread, to make him take to his 
liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look like 
fiery angels." 

And more gravely, " In the cloister rule the seven deadly 
sins, — covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, 
idleness, and the loathing of the service of God." 

Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, some- 
times two thirds, of the land in every country in Europe, 
and, in addition to their other sins, neglecting all the duties 
attaching to this property, the woods cut down and sold, 
the houses falling to ruin, unthrift, neglect, waste every- 
where and in every thing ; the shrewd making the most 
of their time, which they had sense to see might be a short 
one ; the rest dreaming on in sleepy sensuality, dividing 
their hours between the chapel, the pot-house, and the 
brothel. 



64 Times of Erasmus and Jjutlier. 

I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this 
sketch can be impugned ; and, if it be just even in outline, 
then a reformation of some kind or other was overwhehn- 
ingly necessary. Corruption beyond a certain point be- 
comes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The constitu- 
tion of human things cannot away with it. 

Something was to be done ; but what, or how ? There 
were three possible courses. 

Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be 
restored by the heads of the Church themselves. 

Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be 
introduced among clergy and laity alike, by education and 
literary culture. The discovery of the printing-press had 
made possible a diffusion of knowledge which had been 
unattainable in earlier ages. The ecclesiastical constitu- 
tion, like a sick hunian body, might recover its tone if a 
better diet were prepared for it. 

Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the 
matter at once into their own hands, and make free use of 
the pruning-knife and the sweeping-brush. There might 
be much partial injustice, much violence, much wrong- 
headedness ; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to 
the point, and the question was whether any other remedy 
would serve. 

The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. 
The heads of the Church were the last persons in the world 
to discover that any thing was wrong. People of that sort 
always are. For them, the thing as it existed answered 
excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all but 
boundless power. What could they ask for more ? No 
monk drowsing over his wine-pot was less disturbed by 
anxiety than nine out of ten of the high dignitaries who 
were living on the eve of the judgment day, and believed 
that their seat was established for them forever. 

The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you 
may infer from a single example. The Archbishop of 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 65 

Mayence was one of the most enlightened Churchmen in 
Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a friend 
of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, 
and considering his trade, an honorable, high-minded man. 

When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial 
throne was vacant, the Archbishop of Mayence was one of 
seven electors who had to choose a new emperor. 

There were two competitors, Francis the First and Maxi- 
milian's grandson, afterwards the well-known Charles the 
Fifth. 

Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Fred- 
erick of Saxony, Luther's friend and protector, was the 
only one of the party who came out of the business with 
clean hands. 

But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times 
alternately from both the candidates. He took money as 
coolly as the most rascally ten-pound householder in Yar- 
mouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard bargain for his 
actual vote. 

The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn ; nor does 
healthy reform come from high dignitaries like the Arch- 
bishop of Mayence. 

The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the 
following Lectures. 



LECTURE 11. 

In the year 1467, — the year in which Charles the Bold 
became Duke of Burgundy; four years before the great 
battle of Barnet, which established our own fourth Edward 
on the English throne ; about the time when William 
Caxton was setting up his printing-press at Westminster, — 
there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October, 
Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class 
people, were well-to-do in the world. For some reason or 
other they were prevented from marrying by the interfer- 
ence of relations. The father died soon after in a cloister : 
the mother was left with her illegitimate infant, whom she 
called first, after his father, Gerard ; but afterwards, from 
his beauty and grace, she changed his name, — the words 
Desiderius Erasnms, one with a Latin, the other with a 
Greek, derivation, meaning the lovely or delightful one. 

Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little 
Erasmus was the heir of a moderate fortune ; and his guar- 
dians, desiring to appropriate it to themselves, endeavored 
to force him into a convent at Brabant. 

The thought of living and dying in a house of religion 
was dreadfully unattractive ; but an orphan boy's resistance 
was easily overcome. He was bullied into yielding, and, 
when about twenty, took the vows. 

The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, 
was not more lovely when seen from within. 

" A monk's holy obedience," Erasmus wrote after- 
wards, "consists in what? Li leading an honest, chaste, 
and sober life ? Not the least. In acquiring learning, in 
study, and industry ? Still less. A monk may be a glut- 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 67 

ton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, ma- 
lignant, envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is 
within his holy obedience. He has only to be the slave 
of a superior as good for nothing as himself, and he is an 
excellent brother. 

The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's 
intellectual growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, 
mischievous youth. He did not trouble himself to pine 
and mope ; but, like a young thoroughbred in a drove of 
asses, he used his heels pretty freely. 

While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend 
fathers, he distinguished himself equally by his appetite for 
knowledge. It was the dawn of the Renaissance — the re- 
vival of learning. The discovery of printing was reopen- 
mg to modern Europe the great literature of Greece and 
Rome, and the writings of the Christian Fathers. For 
studies of this kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disad- 
vantages of cowl and frock, displayed extraordinary apti- 
tude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was the 
language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the 
devils spoke in the wrong place. His Latin was as 
polished as Cicero's ; and at length the Archbishop of 
Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University of 
Paris. ^ 

At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently 
pleasant, but where his religious habit was every moment 
m his way. He was a priest, and so far could not help him- 
self That ink-spot not all the waters of the German 
Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low 
debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at honie. 
His place was in the society of cultivated men, who were 
glad to know him and to patronizt? ,||^ ; so he shook oft 
his order, let his hair grow, and fluri^^&ay his livery. 

The archbishop's patronage was'^'probably now with- 
drawn. Life in Paris was expensive, and Erasmus had for 
several years to struggle with poverty. We see him, how- 



68 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

ever, for the most part, in his early letters, carrying a 
bold front to fortune : desponding one moment, and lark- 
ing the next with a Paris grisette ; making friends, enjoy- 
ing good company, enjoying especially good wine when he 
could get it ; and, above all, satiating his literary hunger at 
the library of the University. 

In this condition, when about eight and twenty, he made 
acquaintance with two young English noblemen who were 
travelling on the Continent, Lord Mountjoy and one of the 
Greys. 

Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him 
for his tutor, carried him over to England, and introduced 
him at the Court of Henry the Seventh. At once his 
fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in turn 
he was himself delighted with the country and the people. 
English character, English hospitality, English manners — 
every thing English except the beer — equally pleased him. 
In the young London men — the lawyers, the noblemen, 
even in some of the clergy — he found his own passion 
for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years 
younger than himself, became his dearest friend ; and 
Warham, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury — Fisher, 
afterwards Bishop of Rochester — Colet, the famous Dean 
of St. Paul's — the great Wolsey himself — recognized and 
welcomed the rising star of European literature. 

Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a ben- 
efice in Kent, which was afterwards changed to a pen- 
sion. Prince Henry, when he became king, offered him 

— kings in those days were not bad friends to literature 

— Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a 
house large enough to be called a palace, and a pension 
which, converted into our money, would be a thousand 
pounds a year. 

Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not 
like to be caged or tethered. He declined the king's terms, 
but Mountjoy settled a pension on him instead. He had 



Times of Urasmus and Luther. 69 

now a handsome income, and he understood the art of en- 
joying it. He moved about as he pleased — now to Cam- 
bridge, now to Oxford, and as the humor took him, back 
again to Paris ; now staying with Sir Thomas More at Chel- 
sea, now going a pilgrimage with Dean Colet to Becket's 
tomb at Canterbury — but always studying, always gath- 
ering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his 
own mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues which were 
the delight and the despair of his contemporaries. 

Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of 
thought, in his sarcastic skepticism, you see the healthy, 
clever, well-disposed, tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man 
of the world. 

He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. 
At a shrine about Canterbury he was shown an old shoe 
which tradition called the Saint's. At the tomb itself, the 
great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took from 
among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The 
worshipers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped 
hands and upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as 
Erasmus observed, it had but served for the archbishop to 
wipe his nose with ; and Dean Colet, a Puritan before his 
time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and scarcely able 
to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus 
smiled kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in 
some form or other, would remain fools. He took notice 
only of the pile of gold and jewels, and concluded that 
so much wealth might prove dangerous to its possessors. 

The peculiarities of the English people interested and 
amused him. "You are going to England," he wrote 
aflerwards to a friend; "you will not fail to be pleased. 
You will find the great peoi3le there most agreeable and 
gracious ; only be careful not to presume upon their inti- 
macy. They will condescend to your level, but do not you 
therefore suppose that you stand upon theirs. The noble 
lords are gods in their own eyes." 



70 TimeH of Erasmus and Luther. 

" For the other classes, be courteous, give your right 
hand, do not take the wall, do not push yourself. Smile 
on whom you please, but trust no one that you do not 
know ; above all, speak no evil of Elngland to them. They 
are proud of their country above all nations in the world, 
as they have good reason to be." 

These directions might have been written yesterday. 
The manners of the ladies have somewhat changed. 
'• English ladies," says Erasmus, " are divinely pretty, and 
too good-natured. They have an excellent custom among 
them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss 
you when you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss 
j^ou at intervening opj^ortunities ; and their lips are soft, 
warm, and delicious." Pretty well that for a priest ! 

The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Eras- 
mus would have us believe. His own coaxing ways may 
have had something to do with it. At any rate, he found 
England a highly agreeable place of residence. 

Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the 
world. Latin, the language in which he wrote, was in uni- 
versal use. It was the vernacular of the best society in 
Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master of it. 
His satire flashed about among all existing institutions, 
scathing especially his old enemies the monks ; while the 
great secular clergy, who hated the religious orders, were 
delighted to see them scourged, and themselves to have the 
reputation of being patrons of toleration and reform. 

Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, 
obtained from Julius the Second a distinct release from his 
monastic vows ; and shortly after, when the brilliant Leo 
succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about him the magnifi- 
cent cluster of artists who have made his era so illustrious, 
the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and 
become another star in the constellation which surrounded 
the Papal throne. 

Erasmus was at this time forty years old, the age when 



Times of Erasmus and Liither, 71 

ambition becomes powerful in men, and takes the place of 
love of pleasure. He was received at Rome with princely- 
distinction, and he could have asked for nothing — bishop- 
rics, red hats, or red stockings — which would not have 
been freely given to him if he would have consented to 
remain. 

But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by 
finery ; and the Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, 
was but a livery after all. Nothing which Leo the Tenth 
could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his coronet. 
More money he might have had, but of money he had 
already abundance, and outward dignity would have been 
dearly bought by gilded chains. He resisted temptation ; 
he preferred the northern air, where he could breathe at 
liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to make 
his home there. 

But his own sovereign laid claim to his services ; the 
future emperor recalled him to the Low Countries, settled 
a handsome salary upon him, and established him at the 
University of Louvaine. 

He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an 
income as large as many an English nobleman. "We find 
him corresponding w^ith popes, cardinals, kings, and states- 
men ; and, as he grew older, his mind became more fixed 
upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the 
monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute 
irreligion in which the Church was steeped, gave him seri- 
ous alarm. E[e had no enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanati- 
cisms, no sectarian beliefs or superstitions. The breadth 
of his culture, his clear understanding, and the worldly 
moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above liv- 
ing men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the 
system around him was pregnant with danger, and he re- 
solved to devote what remained to him of life to the intro- 
duction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy. 

The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the 



72 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

religious orders. Literature and education, beyond the 
code of the theological text-books, appeared simply devilish 
to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the battle 
was raging over the North of Europe. 

The Dominicans at once recognized in Erasmus their 
most dangerous enemy. At first they tried to compel him 
to reenter the order, but, strong in the Pope's dispensation, 
he was so far able to defy them. They could bark at his 
heels, but dared not come to closer quarters ; and with his 
temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise 
them, he took up boldly the task which he had set him- 
self 

" We kiss the old shoes of the saints," he said, " but we 
never read their works." He undertook the enormous 
labor of editing and translating selections from the writings 
of the Fathers. The New Testament was as little known 
as the lost books of Tacitus ; all that the people knew of 
the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which 
theologians had built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus 
published the text, and with it, and to make it intelligible, 
a series of paraphrases, which rent away the veil of tradi- 
tional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the teach- 
ing of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation 
with reason and conscience. 

In all this, although the monks might curse, lie had 
countenance and encouragement from the great ecclesias- 
tics in all parts of Europe ; and it is highly curious to see 
the extreme freedom with which they allowed him to pro- 
pose to them his plans for a reformation ; we seem to be 
listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen. 

To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he 
writes : — 

" Let us have done with theological refinements. There 
is an excuse for the Fathers, because the heretics forced 
them to define particular points ; but every definition is a 
misfortune, and for us to persevere in the same way is 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 73 

sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does 
not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both 
from the Spirit ? or how the nativity of the Son differs from 
the procession of the Spirit ? Unless I forgive my brother 
his sins against me, God will not forgive me my sins. Un- 
less I have a pure heart — unless I put away envy, hate, 
pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not 
damned because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one 
principle or two. Has he the fruits of the Spirit ? That 
is the question. Is he patient, kind, good, gentle, modest, 
temperate, chaste ? Inquire if you will, but do not define. 
True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless 
we leave the conscience unshackled on obscure points on 
which certainty is impossible. We hear now of questions 
beinor referred to the next Q^cumenical Council : better 
a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time was when a 
man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles 
which he professed. Necessity first brought articles upon 
us, and ever since we have refined and refined till Chris- 
tianity has become a thing of words and creeds. Articles 
increase, sincerity vanishes away, contention grows hot, 
and charity grows cold. Then comes in the civil power, 
with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what 
they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they 
hate, and to say that they understand what in fact has no 
meaning for them." 

Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence : — 
" Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the 
smallest possible number ; you can do it without danger to 
the realities of Christianity. On other points, either dis- 
courage inquiry, or leave every one free to believe what he 
pleases ; then we shall have no more quarrels, and religion 
will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you 
can correct the abuses of which the world with good reason 
complains. The unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. 
You should not shut your ears to the cries of those for 



74 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

whom Christ died. He did not die for the great only, but 
for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. 
Do you only set human affections aside, and let kings and 
princes lend themselves heartily to the public good. But 
observe that the monks and friars be allowed no voice ; 
with these gentlemen the world has borne too long. They 
care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their 
own power ; and they believe that if the people are enlight- 
ened, their kingdom cannot stand." 

Once more to the Pope himself: — 

'• Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When 
he has done that, and will amend his neighbor, let him put 
on Christian charity, which is severe enough when severity 
is needed. If your holiness give power to men who neither 
believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of their 
own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust 
your holiness, but there are bad men who will use your vir- 
tues as a cloak for their own malice." 

That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed 
a man like Erasmus to use language such as this to them 
is a fact of supreme importance. It explains the feeling 
of Goethe, that the world would have gone on better had 
there been no Luther, and that the revival of theological 
fanaticism did more harm than good. 

But the question of questions is, what all this latitudina- 
rian philosophizing, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness 
would have come to if left to itself; or rather, what was 
the effect which it was inevitably producing ? If you wish 
to remove an old building without bringing it in ruins 
about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove the 
stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. 
But latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of 
theology. It destroys the premises on which the dogmatic 
system rests. It would beg the question to say that this 
would in itself have been undesirable ; but the practical 
effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only been 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 75 

to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multi- 
tude to a convenient but debasing superstition. 

The monks said that Erasmus laid the Qgg, and Luther 
hatched a cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an 
account of his work ; but it was true after all. The skep- 
tical philosophy is the most powerful of solvents, but it has 
no principle of organic life in it ; and what of truth there 
was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form 
before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. 
He liimself, in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, 
and despaired of making an impression on the mass of ig- 
norance with which he saw himself surrounded. 

" The stupid monks," he writes, " say mass as a cobbler 
makes a shoe ; they come to the altar reeking from their 
filthy pleasures. Confession with the monks is a cloak to 
steal the people's money, to rob girls of their virtue, and 
commit other crimes too horrible to name ! Yet these 
people are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is 
afraid of them." 

" Beware ! " he says to an impetuous friend, — " beware 
how you offend the monks. You have to do with an enemy 
that cannot be slain ; an order never dies, and they will 
not rest till they have destroyed you." 

The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Eras- 
mus had no confidence in them. "Never," he says, "was 
there a time when divines were greater fools, or popes and 
prelates more worldly." Germany was about to receive a 
signal illustration of the improvement which it was to look 
for from liberalism and intellectual culture. 

We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. 
Here we must leave Erasmus for the present. I nuist carry 
you briefly over the history of the other great person who 
was preparing to play his part on the stage. You have 
seen something of what Erasmus was ; you must turn next 
to the companion picture of Martin Luther. You will ob- 
serve in how many points their early experiences touch, 



76 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

as if to show more vividly the contrast between the two 
men. 

Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in 
the year 1483, Martin Luther came into the world in a 
peasant's cottage, at Eisleben, in Saxony. By peasant, you 
need not understand a common boor. Hans Luther, the 
father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in life — 
adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, 
from farm work to digging in the mines. The family life 
was strict and stern — rather too stern, as Martin thought 
in later life. 

" Be temperate with your children," he said long after, to 
a friend ; " punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in 
what you do. It is a lighter sin to take pears and apples 
than to take money. I shudder when I think of- what I 
went through myself My mother beat me about some 
nuts once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, 
but she meant well." 

At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recol- 
lection of his sufferings made him tender ever after with 
young boys and girls. 

" Never be hard with children," he used to say. " Many 
a fine character has been ruined by the stupid brutality of 
pedagogues. The parts of speech are a boy's pillory. I 
was myself flogged fifteen times in one forenoon over the 
conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will ; but be kind 
too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod." This is not 
the lano^uage of a demagoofue or a fanatic ; it is the wise 
thought of a tender, human-hearted man. 

At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. 
It was then no shame for a poor scholar to maintain him- 
self by alms. Young Martin had a rich noble voice and a 
fine ear, and by singing ballads in the streets he found 
ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with what 
calling he should take up, when it happened that a young 
friend was killed at his side by lightning. 



Times of Erasmus mid Luther. 77 

Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was 
once blown up by lightning in a town where Erasmus was 
staying, and a house of infamous character was destroyed. 
The inhabitants saw in what had happened the Divine 
anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was 
any anger in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly 
which had stored powder in an exposed situation. 

Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He 
was distinguished from other boys only by the greater 
power of his feelings and the vividness of his imagination. 
He saw in his friend's death the immediate hand of 
the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was ter- 
rified. A life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone 
for the faults of his boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, be- 
came a monk, not forced into it, — for his father knew bet- 
ter what the holy men were like, and had no wish to have 
a son of his among them, — but because the monk of Mar- 
tin's imagination spent his nights and days upon the stones 
in prayer ; and Martin, in the heat of his repentance, 
lonored to be kneelino^ at his side. 

In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Er- 
furt. He was full of an overwhelming sense of his own 
wretchedness and sinfulness. Like St. Paul, he was cry- 
ing to be delivered from the body of death which he car- 
ried about him. He practiced all possible austerities. He, 
if no one else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed 
nights in the chancel before the altar, or on his knees on 
the floor of his cell. He weakened his body till his mind 
wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above all, he 
saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God 
required that he shoukl keep the law in all points. He 
had not so kept the law — could not so keep the law — 
and therefore he believed that he was damned. One 
morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead ; a 
brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses 
back to consciousness. 



78 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared 
among the rosy friars of Erfurt. They could not tell what 
to make of him. Staupitz, the prior, listened to his accu- 
sations of himself in confession. " My good fellow," he 
said, " don't be so uneasy ; you have committed no sins of 
the least consequence ; you have not killed any body, or 
committed adultery, or things of that sort. If you sin to 
some purpose, it is right that you should think about it, 
but don't make mountains out of trifles." 

Very curious : to the commonplace man the uncommon- 
place is forever unintelligible. What was the good of all 
that excitement — that agony of self-reproach for little 
things ? None at all, if the object is only to be an ordinary 
good sort of man — if a decent fulfillment of the round of 
common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life 
on earth. 

The plague came by and by into the town. The com- 
monplace clergy ran away, — went to their country-houses, 
went to the hills, went anywhere, — and they wondered in 
the same way why Luther would not go with them. They 
admired him and liked him. They told him his life was 
too precious to be thrown away. He answered quite sim- 
ply, that his place was with the sick and dying ; a monk's 
life was no great matter. The sun he did not doubt would 
continue to shine, whatever became of him. " I am no St. 
Paul," he said ; " I am afraid of death ; but there are 
things worse than death, and if I die, I die." 

Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an ex- 
traordinary youth in his charge. To divert his mind from 
feeding upon itself, he devised a mission for him abroad, 
and brother Martin was dispatched on business of the con- 
vent to Rome. 

Luther too, Hke Erasmus, was to see Rome ; but how 
different the figures of the two men there ! Erasmus goes 
with servants and horses, the polished, successful man of 
the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless and barefoot 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 79 

across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the 
monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents 
fail him, at the farm-houses. 

He was still young, and too much occupied with his own 
sins to know much of the world outside him. Erasmus 
had no dreams. He knew the hard truth on most things. 
But Eome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the 
saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with 
the odors of Paradise. " Blessed Rome," he cried as he 
entered the gate, — '' Blessed Rome, sanctified with the 
blood of martyrs ! " 

Alas ! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. 
He remained long enough to complete his disenchantment. 
The cardinals, with their gilded chariots and their parasols 
of peacocks' plumes, were poor representatives of the 
Apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous rit- 
uals, the pagan splendor of the paintings, the heathen gods 
still almost worshiped in the adoration of the art which 
had formed them, to Luther, whose heart was heavy with 
thoughts of man's depravity, were utterly horrible. The 
name of religion was there : the thinnest veil was scarcely 
spread over the utter disbelief with Avhich God and Christ 
were at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It 
was the Rome of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Peru- 
gino and Benvenuto ; but to the poor German monk, who 
had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was 
culture ? 

He fled at the first moment that he could. " Adieu ! 
Rome," he said ; " let all who would lead a holy life depart 
from Rome. Every thing is permitted in Rome except to 
be an honest man." He had no . thought of leaving the 
Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leav- 
ing the Church was like talking of leaping off the planet. 
But perplexed and troubled he returned to Saxony ; and 
his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a monastery was no 
i:)lace for him, recommended him to the Elector as Pro- 
fessor of Philosophy at Wittenberg. 



80 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the 
town church, and there at once he had room to show what 
was in him. '' This monk," said some one who heard him, 
" is a marvelous fellow. He has strange eyes, and will 
give the doctors trouble by and by." 

He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare 
and almost unknown book, the " New Testament." He 
was not cultivated like Erasnnis. Erasmus spoke the most 
polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacu- 
lar German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical 
acuteness, the skeptical toleration of Erasmus were alike 
strange and distasteful to him. In all things he longed 
only to know the truth — to shake off and hurl from him 
lies and humbug. 

Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils 
and fairies — a thousand things without basis in fact, which 
Erasmus passed by in contemptuous indifference. But for 
things which were really true — true as nothing else in this 
world, or any world, is true — the justice of God, the infi- 
nite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of evil — 
these things he believed and felt with a power of passion- 
ate conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the 
other was forever a stranger. 

We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther 
was thirty-five years old. A new cathedral was in progress 
at Rome. Michael Angelo had furnished Leo the Tenth 
with the design of St. Peter's ; and the question of ques- 
tions was to find money to complete the grandest structure 
which had ever been erected by man. 

Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of man- 
kind. The work to be done was to be the most splendid 
which art could produce. The means to which the Pope 
had recourse will serve to show us how much all that would 
have done for us. 

You remember what I told you about indulgences. The 
notable device of his Holiness was to send distinguished 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 81 

persons about Europe with sacks of indulgences. In- 
dulgences and dispensations ! Dispensations to eat meat 
on fast-days ; dispensations to marry one's near relation ; 
dispensations for any thing and every thing which the faith- 
ful might wish to purchase who desired forbidden j^leasures. 
The dispensations were simply scandalous. The indul- 
gences — well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays what 
they were, he will say that they were the remission of the 
penances which the Church inflicts upon earth ; but it is 
also certain that they would have sold cheap if the people 
had thought that this was all that they were to get l)y them. 
As the thing was represented by the spiritual hawkers who 
disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on 
Heaven. When the great book was opened, the people be- 
lieved that these papers would be found entire on the right 
side of the account. Debtor, so many murders, so many 
robberies, lies, slanders, or debaucheries. Creditor, the 
merits of the saints placed to the account of the delinquent 
by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value received. 

This is the way in which the pardon system was prac- 
tically worked. This is the way in which it is worked still, 
where the same superstitions remain. 

If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed 
in these pardons of his, he would have said officially that 
the Church had always held that the Pope had power to 
grant them. 

Had he told the truth, he would have added privately 
that if the people chose to be fools, it was not for him to 
disappoint them. 

The collection went on. The money of the faithful came 
\h plentifully ; and the pedlars going their rounds appeared 
at last in Saxony. 

The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of 
Mayence, Erasmus's friend, by promising him half the spoil 
which was gathered in his province. The agent was the 



82 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has acquired a for- 
lorn notoriety in European history. 

His stores were opened in town after town. He entered 
in state. The streets everywhere were hung with flags. 
Bells were pealed ; nuns and monks walked in procession 
before and after him, while he himself sat in a chariot, with 
the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him. The 
sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, 
the candles lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned con- 
spicuously on the roof. Tetzel, from the pulpit, explained 
the efficacy of his medicines ; and if any profane person 
doubted their power, he was threatened with excommuni- 
cation. 

Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking the plates 
and crying, " Buy ! buy ! " The business went as merry as 
a marriage-bell till the Dominican came near to Witten- 
berg. 

Half a century before, such a spectacle would have ex- 
cited no particular attention. The few who saw through 
the imposition would have kept their thoughts to them- 
selves ; the many would have paid their money, and in a 
month all would have been forgotten. 

But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, 
the writings of Erasmus and Peuchlin, the satires of Ulric 
von Hutten, had created a silent revolution in the minds 
of the younger laity. 

A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church 
authorities knew nothing ; and the whole air of Germany, 
unsuspected by pope or prelate, was charged with elec- 
tricity. 

Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have 
remained silent. What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary 
monk, that he should set himself against the majesty of 
the triple crown ? 

However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 83 

confined alone there does not dash his hands against the 
stones. 

But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts 
of thousands. Many wrong things, as we all know, have 
to be endured in this world. Authorit}^ is never very an- 
gelic ; and moderate injustice, a moderate quantity of lies, 
is more tolerable than anarchy. 

But it is with human things as it is with the great ice- 
bergs which drift southward out of the frozen seas. They 
swim two thirds under water, and one third above ; and so 
long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would think that 
they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is 
warmer than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the 
tepid current washes the base of the berg. Silently in 
those far deeps the centre of gravity is changed ; and then, 
in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass heaves 
over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so 
proudly in the sunlight are buried in the ocean forever. 

Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, 
and Luther knew it, and knew that the time was come for 
him to speak. Fear had not kept him back. The danger 
to himself would be none the less because he would have 
the people at his side. The fiercer the thunder-storm, the 
greater peril to the central figure who stands out above the 
rest exposed to it. But he saw that there was hope at last 
of a change ; and for himself — as he said in the plague — 
if he died, he died. 

Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not 
like danger. 

" As to me," he wrote to Archbishop Warham, " I have 
no inclination to risk my life for truth. We have not all 
strength for martyrdom ; and if trouble come, I shall imi- 
tate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle the creeds. 
If they settle them well, so much the better ; if ill, I shall 
keep on the safe side." 

That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Eras- 



84 Times of JEras7nus and Luthe?: 

mus. He would prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, 
he could get on moderately well upon falsehood. Luther 
could not. No matter what the danger to himself, if he 
could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was better 
pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of 
Luther's doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological ver- 
biage, that doctrine means this. 

Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are 
desirable things. They make men happier in themselves, 
and make society more prosperous. But there reason ends, 
and man will not die for j^rinciples of utility. Faith says 
that between truth and lies there is an infinite difference ; 
one is of God, the other of Satan ; one is eternally to be 
loved, the other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say 
why, in language intelligible to reason. It is the voice of 
the nobler nature in man speaking out of his heart. 

While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming 
to Wittenberg, Luther, loyal still to authority while there 
was a hope that authority would be on the side of right, 
wn'ote to the Archbishop of Mayence to remonstrate. 

The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of 
Tetzel's spoils ; and what were the complaints of a poor 
insignificant monk to a supreme archbishop who was in 
debt and wanted money ? 

The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his 
waste-paper basket ; and Luther made his solemn appeal 
from earthly dignities to the conscience of the German 
people. He set up his protest on the church door at Wit- 
tenberg ; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the 
Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works. 

The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. 
God alone remits sins ; and He pardons those who are 
penitent, without help from man's absolutions. 

The Church may remit penalties which the Church in- 
flicts. But the Church's power is in this world only, and 
does not reach to purgatory. 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 85 

If God has thought fit to place a man in pin'gatory, who 
shall say that it is good for him to be taken out of pur- 
gatory? who shall say that he himself desires it. 

True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. 
True repentance rather loves chastisement. 

The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor 
than to buy indulgences ; and he who sees his neighbor in 
want, and instead of helping his neighbor buys a pardon 
for himself, is doing what is displeasing to God. Wlio is 
this man who dares to say that for so many crowns the 
soul of a sinner can be made whole ? 

These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little 
guessed the Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act 
which had been done. The Pope, when he saw the theses, 
smiled in good-natured contempt. "A drunken German 
wrote them," he said ; " when he has slept off his wine he 
will be of another mind." 

Tetzel bayed defiance ; the Dominican friars took up 
the quarrel ; and Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, 
clamored for fire and fagot. 

Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Ger- 
many over were like kennels of hounds howling to each 
other across the spiritual waste. If souls could not be 
sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone. 

Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited 
him to answer for his audacity at Rome ; while to the young 
laymen, to the noble spirits all Europe over, Wittenberg 
became a beacon of light shining in the universal dark- 
ness. 

It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller 
man, he would have been swept away by his sudden popu- 
larity — he would have placed himself at the head of some 
great democratic movement, and in a few years his name 
would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy. 

But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were 
heartily on his side. He remained quietly at his post in 



86 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

the Augustine Church at Wittenberg. If the powers, of 
the world crane down upon him and killed him, he was 
ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought in- 
finitely little ; and he believed that his death would be as 
serviceable to truth as his life. 

Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could 
have had their way. It happened, however, that Saxony 
just then was governed by a prince of no common order. 
Were all princes like the Elector Frederick, we should 
have no need of democracy in this world — we should never 
have heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch 
Luther acainst the will of the Wittenberg: senate, unless the 
.Elector would help them ; and, to the astonishment of 
every body, the Elector was disinclined to consent. The 
Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The 
Elector still hesitated. His professed creed was the creed 
in which the Church had educated him ; but he had a clear 
secular understanding outside his formulas. When he read 
the propositions, they did not seem to him the pernicious 
things which the monks said they were. " There is much 
in the Bible about Christ," he said, " but not much about 
Rome." He sent for Erasmus, and asked him what he 
thought about the matter. 

The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished 
for a direct answer, and looked Erasmus full and broad in 
the face. Erasmus pinched his thin lips together. " Luther," 
he said at length, " has committed two sins : he has touched 
the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies." 

He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield 
for the present to Pope Leo's importunacy ; and the Pope 
was obliged to try less hasty and more formal methods. 

He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where 
his process would have had a rapid end. As this could 
not be, the case was transferred to Augsburg, and a cardi- 
nal legate was sent from Italy to look into it. 

There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The 



Ti77ies of Erasmus and Luther. 87 

townspeople there and everywhere were on the side of free- 
dom ; and Lnther went cheerfully to defend himself He 
walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in his 
monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back — 
an apostle of the old sort. The citizens, high and low, at- 
tended him to the gates, and followed him along the road, 
crying, " Luther forever ! " " Nay," he answered, " Christ 
forever." 

The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of 
politeness, received him civilly. He told him, however, 
simply and briefly, that the Pope insisted on his recanta- 
tion, and would accept nothing else. Luther requested the 
cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The 
cardinal waived discussion. " He was come to command," 
he said, " not to argue." And Luther had to tell him that 
it could not be. 

Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were 
tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held 
out to him if he would only be reasonable. To the amaze- 
ment of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's son — a misera- 
ble friar of a provincial German town — was prepared to 
defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of 
Christendom. " Wh;it ! " said the cardinal at last to him, 
" do you think the Pope cares for the opinion of a Ger- 
man boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than all 
Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms 
to defend you — you, a wretched worm like you? I tell 
you, No ! and where will you be then — where will you be 
then ? " 

Luther answered, " Then, as now, in the hands of Al- 
mighty God." 

The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his 
report to his master. The Pope, so defied, brought out his 
thunders ; he excommunicated Luther ; he wrote again to 
the Elector, entreating him not to soil his name and lineage 
by becoming a protector of heretics ; and he required him, 



88 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to 
justice. 

The Elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel 
was simply between Luther and .the Pope. The Elector 
was by no means sure that his bold subject was right — he 
was only not satisfied that he was wrong — and it was a 
serious question with him how far he ought to go. The 
monk might next be placed under the ban of the empire ; 
and if he persisted in protecting him afterwards. Saxony 
might have all the power of Germany upon it. He did not 
venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporized and 
delayed ; while Luther himself, probably at the Elector's 
instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving 
his duty to Christ, he promised to be for the future an 
obedient son of the Church, and to say no more about in- 
dulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them. 

" My being such a small creature," Luther said after- 
wards, " was a misfortune for the Pope. He despised me 
too much ! What, he thought, could a slave like me do to 
him — to him, who was the greatest man in the world ? 
Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished 
me." 

But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, 
irascible, exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms 
with the town preacher of Wittenberg was too prepos- 
terous. 

Just then the imperial throne fell vacant ; and the pretty 
scandal I told you of, followed at the choice of his succes- 
sor. Frederick of Saxony might have been elected if he 
had liked — and it would have been better for the world 
perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high dig- 
nities — but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble 
himself with the imperial sceptre. The election fell on 
Maximilian's grandson Charles — grandson also of Ferdi- 
nand the Catholic — Sovereign of Spain ; Sovereign of 
Burgundy and the Low Countries ; Sovereign of Naples 



Timeis of Erasmus and Luther. 89 

and Sicily ; Sovereign beyond the Atlantic, of the New 
Empire of the Indies. 

No fitter man could have been found to do the business 
of the Pope. With the empire of Germany added to his 
inherited dominions, who could resist him ? 

To the new Emperor, unless the Elector yielded, Luther's 
case had now to be referred. 

The Elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Ger- 
many was attentive, but motionless. The students, the 
artisans, the tradesmen, were at heart with the Reformer ; 
and their enthusiasm could not be wholly repressed. The 
press grew fertile with pamphlets ; and it was noticed that 
all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The 
Catholics could not get their books into type without send- 
ing them to France or the Low Countries. 

Yet none of the princes except the Elector had as yet 
shown him favor. The bishops were hostile to a man. The 
nobles had given no sign ; and their place would be natu- 
rally on the side of authority. They had no love for 
bishops — there was hope in that ; and they looked with 
no favor on the huge estates of the religious orders. But 
no one could expect that they would peril their lands and 
lives for an insignificant monk. 

There was an interval of two years before the Emperor 
was at leisure to take up the question. The time was spent 
in angry altercation, boding no good for the future. 

The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and 
his works. Luther replied by burning the bull in the great 
square at Wittenberg. 

At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assem- 
bled at Worms, and Luther was called to defend himself 
in the presence of Charles the Fifth. 

That it should have come to this at all, in days of such 
high-handed authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It in- 
dicated something growing in the minds of men, that the 
so-called Church was not to carry things any longer in the 



90 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the laity 
intended for the future to have opinions of their own how 
far such orders should be obeyed. 

The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means 
or foul, would now rid him of his adversary. The Elector, 
who knew the ecclesiastical ways of handling such matters, 
made it a condition of his subject appearing, that he should 
have a safe - conduct, under the Emperor's hand ; that 
Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for 
the time to return to the place from which he had come ; 
and that he, the Elector, should determine afterwards what 
should be done with him. 

When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe- 
conducts, it was too well known, were poor security. Pope 
Clement the Seventh, a little after, when reproached for 
breaking a promise, replied with a smile, " The Pope has 
the povv'er to bind and to loose." Good, in the eyes of 
ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the 
Church ; evil, whatever was bad for the Church ; and the 
hicrhest moral oblia^ation became sin when it stood in St. 
Peter's way. 

There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia 
a century and a half before. John Huss, Luther's fore- 
runner, came with a safe-conduct to the Council of Con- 
stance ; but the bishops ruled that safe-conducts could not 
protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their 
promises, and they hoped now that so good a Catholic as 
Charles would follow so excellent a precedent. Pope Leo 
wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe-conduct should not 
be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when Charles 
consulted them, took the same view as the Pope. 

" There is something in the office of a bishop," Luther 
said, a year or two later, "which is dreadfully demoral- 
izing. Even good men change their natures at their conse- 
cration ; Satan enters into them as he entered into Judas, 
as soon as they have taken the sop." 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 91 

It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted him- 
self at the Diet on the faith of his safe-conduct, he would 
never return alive. Rumors of intended treachery were so 
strong, that if he refused to go, the Elector meant to stand 
by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not appear? 
It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment 
would go against him by default. Charles would call out 
the forces of the empire, and Saxony would be invaded. 

Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Ger- 
many, with no certain prospect except bloodshed and 
misery. 

Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that 
his own person might escape. He had provoked the storm ; 
and if blood was to be shed, his blood ought at least to be 
the first. He went. On his way, a friend came to warn 
him again that foul play was intended, that he was con- 
demned already, that his books had been burnt by the 
hangman, and that he was a dead man if he proceeded. 

Luther trembled — he owned it — but he answered, 
" Go to Worms ! I will go if there are as many devils in 
Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs of the houses." 

The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, 
not with devils, but with the inhabitants, all collecting there 
to see him as he passed. A nobleman gave him shelter 
for the night ; the next day he was led to the Town Hall. 

No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this 
planet for many a century — not, perhaps, since a greater 
than Luther stood before the Roman Procurator. 

There on the raised dais sat the sovereign of half the 
world. There on either side of him stood the archbishops, 
the ministers of state, the princes of the empire, gathered 
together to hear and judge the son of a poor miner, who 
had made the world ring with his name. 

The body of the hall was thronged with knights and 
nobles — stern hard men in dull gleaming armor. Luther, 
in his brown frock, was led forward between their ranks. 



92 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

The looks which greeted him were not all unfriendly. The 
first article of a German credo was belief in courage. Ger- 
many had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, 
and they were not without pride that a poor countryman of 
theirs should have taken by the beard the great Italian 
priest. They had settled among themselves that, come 
what would, there should be fair play ; and they looked on 
half admiring and half in scorn. 

As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him 
on the shoulder with his gauntlet. 

" Pluck up thy spirit, little monk," he said ; " some of us 
here have seen warm work in our time, but, by my troth, 
nor I nor any knight in this company ever needed a stout 
heart more than thou needest it now. If thou hast faith 
in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name 
of God." 

" Yes, in the name of God," said Luther, throwing back 
his head. " In the name of God, forward ! " 

As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther 
had broken the laws of the Church. He had taught doc- 
trines which the Pope had declared to be false. Would he 
or would he not retract ? 

As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract 
when his doctrines were not declared to be false merely, 
but were proved to be false. Then, but not till then. That 
was his answer, and his last word. 

There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed 
rested. In those words lay the whole meaning of the Ref- 
ormation. Were men to go on forever saying that this 
and that was true, because the Pope affirmed it ? Or were 
Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of 
other men, by the ordinary laws of evidence ? 

It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's 
pardon, which you could buy for five shillings, could not 
really get a soul out of purgatory. It required a quality 
much rarer than intellect to look such a doctrine in the 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 93 

face — sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages, and 
backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power — and 
say to it openly, " You are a lie." Cleverness and culture 
could have given a thousand reasons — they did then and 
they do now — why an indulgence should be believed in ; 
when honesty and common sense could give but one rea- 
son for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get 
on excellently well together, — imposture and veracity, 
never. 

Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 
" Your pardons are no pardons at all — no letters of credit 
on Heaven, but flash notes of the Bank of Humbug, and 
you know it." They did know it. The conscience of every 
man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was 
true. 

Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which 
were needed — which were needed then, and are needed 
always, as the root of all real greatness in man. 

The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came 
among the heathen nations, and found them worshiping 
idols, did not care much to reason that an image which 
man had made could not be God. The priests might have 
been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to 
the idol in the presence of its votaries. They threw stones 
at it, spat upon it, insulted it. " See," they said, " I do this 
to your God. If he is God, let him avenge himself." 

It was a simple argument ; always effective ; easy, and 
yet most difficult. It required merely a readiness to be 
killed upon the spot by the superstition which it outraged. 

And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in 
any such matters. The form changes, — the thing remains. 
Superstition, folly, and cunning will go on to the end of 
time, spinning their poison webs around the consciences of 
mankind. Courage and veracity, — these qualities, and 
only these, avail to defeat them. 

From the moment that Luther left the Emperor's pres- 



94 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

ence a free man, the spell of Absolutism was broken, and 
the victory of the Reformation secured. *The ban of the 
Pope had fallen ; the secular arm had been called to inter- 
fere ; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would 
bear. The Emperor himself was an unconscious convert to 
the higher creed. The Pope had urged him to break his 
word. The Pope had told him that honor was nothing, and 
morality was nothing, where the interests of orthodoxy were 
compromised. The Emperor had refused to be tempted 
into perjury ; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was 
a spiritual power upon the earth, above the Pope, and 
above him. 

The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed 
to assassinate Luther on his return to Saxony. The in- 
sulted majesty of Rome could be vindicated at least by the 
dagger. 

But this, too, failed. The Elector heard what was in- 
tended. A party of horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid 
the Reformer upon the road, and carried him off to the 
castle of Wartzburg, where he remained out of harm's way 
till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the 
reach of danger. 

At Wartzburg for the present evening we leave him. 

The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. 
The monks of Yuste, who watched on the death-bed of 
Charles, reported that at the last hour he repented that he 
had kept his word, and reproached himself for having al- 
lowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands. 

It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning 
low, and spirit and flesh were failing together, and the air 
of the sick-room was thick and close with the presence of 
the angel of death, the nobler nature of the Emperor might 
have yielded to the influences which were around him. 
His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words 
which he so wished to hear. 

But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a 



Times of Erasmus and Luther, 95 

Catholic of the old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas 
were but the robe of a regal humanity. Another story is 
told of Charles — an authentic story this one — which 
makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or ma- 
ligned him. Six and twenty years after this scene at 
Worms, when the then dawning heresy had become broad 
day ; when Luther had gone to his rest, and there had 
gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel for 
an enemy who has proved too strong for them, a passing 
vicissitude in the struggle brought the Emperor at the head 
of his army to Wittenberg. 

The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon 
him in life, they proposed to wreak upon his bones. 

The Emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb ; 
and as he stood gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some 
one suggested that the body should be taken up and burnt 
at the stake in the Market Place. 

There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the 
common practice of the Catholic Church with the remains 
of heretics, who were held unworthy to be left in repose in 
hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps, another 
Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But 
Charles was one of Nature's gentlemen ; he answered, " I 
war not with the dead." 



LECTURE III. 

We have now entered upon the movement which broke 
the power of the Papacy, — which swept Germany, Swe- 
den, Denmark, Holland, England, Scotland, into the stream 
of revolution, and gave a new direction to the spiritual his- 
tory of mankind. 

You would not thank me if I were to take you out into 
that troubled ocean. I confine myself, and T wish you to 
confine your attention, to the two kinds of men who appear 
as leaders in times of change, — of whom Erasmus and 
Luther are respectively the types. 

On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian 
philosophers — men who have no confidence in the people 
— who have no passionate convictions ; moderate men, tol- 
erant men, who trust to education, to general progress in 
knowledge and civilization, to forbearance, to endurance, 
to time, — men who believe that all wholesome reforms 
proceed downwards' from the educated to the multitudes ; 
who regard with contempt, qualified by terror, appeals to 
the popular conscience or to popular intelligence. 

Opposite to these are the men of faith, — and by faith 
I do not mean belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, 
belief in justice, in righteousness ; above all, belief in truth. 
Men of faith consider conscience of more importance than 
knowledge, — or rather as a first condition, — without 
which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a man, if 
he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense 
of the word. They are not contented with looking for what 
may be useful or pleasant to themselves ; they look by 
quite other methods for what is honorable, for what is good, 



Times of Erasmus and Luther, 97 

for what is just. They believe that if they can find out 
that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present conse- 
quences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individ- 
ually, and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, 
in this world or in any other, still they would say, '• Let us 
do that and nothing else. Life will be of no value to us 
if we are to use it only for our own gratification." 

The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and 
pretends to be ill, he may escape danger and make sure 
of his life. There are very few men, indeed, if it comes to 
that, who would not sooner die ten times over than so dis- 
honor themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out 
the same principle into the details of their daily life ; they 
do not care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my 
Uncle Toby, they have but one fear — the fear of doing a 
wrong thing. 

I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will 
satisfy the scientific inquirer, that there is any such thing 
as moral truth ; any such thing as absolute right and wrong 
at all. As the Scripture says, " Verily, thou art a God that 
hidest thyself" The forces of Nature pay no respect to 
what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly 
follow virtue ; nor are defeat and failure necessary conse- 
quences of vice. 

Certain virtues — temperance, industry, and things within 
reasonable limits — command their reward. Sensuality, 
idleness, and waste commonly lead to ruin. 

But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, 
intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart ; while the 
grander features of human character, — self-sacrifice, dis- 
regard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion 
to any great and good cause, — these have no tendency to 
bring men what is called fortune. They do not even neces- 
sarily promote their happiness ; for do what they will in this 
way, the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies 
before them. High hopes and enthusiasms are generally 



98 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

disappointed in results ; and the wrongs, the cruelties, the 
wretchednesses of all kinds which forever prevail among 
mankind, — the shortcomings in himself of which he be- 
comes more conscious as he becomes really better, — these 
things, you may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man 
from ever being particularly happy. 

If you see a man happy, as the world goes, — contented 
with himself and contented with what is round him, — such 
a man may be, and probably is, decent and respectable ; 
but the highest is not in him, and the highest will not come 
out of him. 

Judging merely by outward phenomena, judging merely 
by what we call reason, you cannot j)rove that there is any 
moral government in the world at all, except what men, for 
their own convenience, introduce into it. Right and wrong 
resolve themselves into principles of utility and social con- 
venience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent 
rule of conduct for com.mon purposes ; and virtue, by a 
large school of philosophy, is completely resolved into that. 

True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, 
they are apt to find at last that they have been mistaken. 
They find it in bankruptcy of honor and character, in so- 
cial wreck and dissolution. All lies in serious matters end 
at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is the final 
issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The 
Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue 
which forgets or denies the nobler principles of action. 

But the end is oflen lonoj in comino: ; and these nobler 
principles are meanwhile not provided for us by the induct- 
ive philosophy. 

Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think some- 
thing, — a readiness to devote our energies while we live, 
to devote our lives, if nothing else will serve, to what we 
call our country, — what are we to say of that ? 

I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought 
of patriotism. He said he thought it was a compound of 



Times of M'asmus cmd Luthe7\ 99 

vanity and superstition ; a bad kind of prejudice, M'hich 
would die out with the growth of reason. My friend be- 
lieved in the progress of humanity ; he could not narroAV 
his sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I 
could but say to myself, " Thank God, then, we are not yet 
a nation of philosophers." 

A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write 
fine books, and review articles and such like, but at the 
bottom of him he is a poor caitiff, and there is no more to 
be said about him. 

So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live 
only to make money, and the service of God is become a 
thing of words and ceremonies, and the kingdom of heaven 
is bought and sold, and all that is high and pure in man is 
smothered by corruption, fire of the same kind bursts out 
in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be con- 
trolled ; and, confident in truth and right, they call fear- 
lessly on the seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed 
the knee to Baal to rise and stand by them. 

They do not ask whether those whom they address have 
wide knowledge of history, or science, or philosophy ; they 
ask rather that they shall be honest, that they shall be 
brave, that they shall be true to the common light which 
God has given to all Plis children. They know well that 
conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the 
cultivated, that to be generous and unselfish is no i:)reroga- 
tive of rank or intellect. 

Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be 
as good as truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to 
be a lie, to Luther was deadly poison, — poison to him, and 
poison to all who meddled with it. In his own genuine 
greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent distinctions 
in his own favor ; or to believe that any one class on earth 
is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great 
Maker of them all. 

Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I 



100 Times of JErasmus and Luther. 

mean by intellect. It was not that Luther was without in- 
tellect. He was less subtle, less learned, than Erasmus ; 
but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and imaginative 
power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created 
the German lanouaore as an instrument of literature. His 
translation of the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, 
and his table-talk as full of matter as vShakespeare's plays. 

Again ; you will mistake me if you think I represent 
Erasmus as a man without conscience, or belief in God 
and goodness. But in Luther that belief was a certainty ; 
in Erasmus it was only a high probability, and the differ- 
ence between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In 
Luther, it was the root ; in Erasmus, it was the flower. 
In Luther, it was the first principle of life ; in Erasmus, it 
was an inference which might be taken away, and yet leave 
the world a very tolerable and habitable place after all. 

You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Eras- 
mus, light, bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, 
fond of wine and kisses, and intellectual talk and polished 
company. You see Luther throwing himself into the clois- 
ter, that he might subdue his will to the will of God ; pros- 
trate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting his 
easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his 
conscience. 

You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see 
Erasmus addressing himself with persuasive eloquence to 
kings, and popes, and prelates ; and for answer, you see 
Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his carriage- 
load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, 
our own gifted, admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat 
beside the bishops and sending poor Protestant artisans to 
the stake. 

You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before 
the world, one lone man, with all authority against him, 
taking lies by the throat, and Europe thrilling at his words, 
and saying after him, " The reign of Imposture shall end." 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 101 

Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest 
had broken. 

He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what 
Erasmus had been all his life convinced of, and Luther 
looked to see him come forward and take his place at his 
side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things woidd 
have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputa- 
tion Vv'ould have given the Reformers the influence wilh the 
educated which they had w^on for themselves with the mul- 
titude, and the Pope would have been left without a friend 
to the north of the Alps. But there would have been some 
danger, — d^mger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to 
the cause, — and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom. 

His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the 
Elector, as we have seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 
" I looked on Luther," he wrote to Duke George of Saxe, 
" as a necessary evil in the corruption of the Church ; a 
medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health 
would follow." 

And again, more boldly : " Luther has taken up the 
cause of honesty and good sense against abominations 
which are no longer tolerable. His enemies are men un- 
der whose worthlessness the Christian world has groaned 
too long." 

So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them 
to be moderate and careful : — 

" I neither approve Luther nor condemn him," he said 
to the Archbishop of IMayence ; " if he is innocent, he 
ought not to be oppressed by the factions of the wicked ; 
if he is in error, he should be answered, not destroyed. 
The theologians " — observe how true they remain to the 
universal type in all times and in all countries — '• the 
theologians do not try to answer him. They do but raise 
an insane and senseless clamor, and shriek and curse. 
Heresy, heretic, heresiarch^ schismatic. Antichrist, — these 
are the words which are in the mouths of all of them ; and 



102 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

of course, they condemn without readhig. I warned them 
what they were doing. I told them to scream less, and to 
think more. Luther's life they admit to be innocent and 
blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The most hu- 
mane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would 
rather kill him than mend him. The Dominicans are the 
worst, and are more knaves than fools. In old times, even 
a heretic was quietly listened to. If he recanted, he was 
absolved ; if he j)ersisted, he was at worst excommunicated. 
Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with 
them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak 
good Latin is heresy. Whatever they do not understand 
is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has given birth to Lu- 
ther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks 
more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is 
his crime. This is plain at least, that the best men every- 
where are those who are least offended with him." 

Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus 
wrote bravely ; separating himself from Luther, yet depre- 
cating violence. " Nothing," he said, " would so recom- 
mend the new teachino- as the howlino; of fools : " while to 
a member of Charles's council he insisted that " severity 
had been often tried in such cases and had always failed ; 
unless Luther was encountered calmly and reasonably, a 
tremendous convulsion was inevitable." 

Wisely said, all this, but it presumed that those whom he 
was addressing were reasonable men ; and high officials, 
touched in their pride, are a class of persons of whom Solo- 
mon may have been thinking when he said, " Let a bear 
robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his 
folly." 

So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached mod- 
eration. It was like preaching to the winds in a hurricane. 
The typhoon itself is not wilder than human creatures 
when once their passions are stirred. You cannot check 
them ; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wdsely. 
And this, Erasmus had not the heart to do. 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 103 

He said at the beginning, " I will not countenance revolt 
against authority. A bad government is better than none." 
But he said at the same time, " You bishops, cease to be cor- 
rupt ; you popes and cardinals, reform your wicked courts ; 
you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and obey the rules 
of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind, 
and be obeyed and loved as before." 

Wlien he found that the case was desperate ; that his 
exhortations were but words addressed to the winds ; that 
corrui3tion had tainted the blood ; that there was no hope 
except in revolution — as, indeed, in his heart he knew 
from the first that there was none — then his place ought 
to have been with Luther, 

But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still 
in feeble uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputa- 
tion weighed him down. 

The Lutherans said, "You believe as we do." The 
Catholics said, " You are a Lutheran at heart ; if you are 
not, prove it by attacking Luther." 

He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not 
read Luther's books, and had no time to read them. What 
was he, he said, that he should meddle in such a quarrel. 
He was the vine and the fioj-tree of the Book of Judges. 
The trees said to them. Rule over us. The vine and the 
fig-tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for 
such a thankless office. " I am a poor actor," he said ; " I 
prefer to be a spectator of the play." 

But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. 
All had been going on so smoothly — literature was reviv- 
ing; art and science were spreading, the mind of the world 
wa!i being reformed in the best sense by the classics of 
Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been 
flung out into Europe. 

The monks who had fought against enlightenment could 
point to the confusion as a fulfillment of their prophecies ; 
and he, and all that he had done, was brought to disre- 
pute. 



104 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced 
to pretend to an orthodoxy which he did not possess. 
Were all true which Luther had written, he pretended that 
it ought not have been said, or should have been addressed 
in a learned language to the refined and educated. 

He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to 
teach the people lies for their good, when truth was beyond 
their comprehension. Yet he could not for all that wish 
the Church to be successful. 

" I fear for that miserable Luther," he said ; " the popes 
and princes are furious with him. His own destruction 
would be no great matter, but if the monks triumph there 
will be no bearing them. They will never rest till they 
have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects 
me to write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can 
call him names — call him blockhead, fool, heretic, toad- 
stool, schismatic, and Antichrist — but they must come to 
me to answer his arguments." 

" Oh ! that this had never been," he wrote to our own 
Archbishop Warham. " Now there is no hope for any 
good. It is all over with quiet learning, thought, piety, 
and progress ; violence is on one side and folly on the 
other ; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I 
joined Luther I could only perish with him, and I do not 
mean to run my neck into a halter. Popes and emperors 
must decide matters. I will accept what is good, and do 
as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than 
the justest war." 

Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too 
clever, too genuine — he had too great a contempt for 
worldly greatness. They offered him a bishopric if he 
would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What 
was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among 
his books at Louvaine. 

But there was no more quiet for Erasnms at Louvaine 
or anywhere. Here is a scene between him and the Prior 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 105 

of the Dominicans in the presence of the Rector of the 
University. 

The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the Uni- 
versity pulpit. Erasmus complained to the rector, and the 
rector invited the Dominican to defend himself Erasmus 
tells the story. 

" I sat on one side and the monk on the other, the rec- 
tor between us to prevent our scratching. 

" The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had 
done no harm. 

" I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm. 

" It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He 
turned purple. 

" ' Why do you abuse monks in your books ? ' he said. 

" ' I spoke of your order,' I answered. ' I did not men- 
tion you. You denounced me by name as a friend of Lu- 
ther.' 

" He raged like a madman. ' You are the cause of all 
this trouble,' he said ; ' you are a chameleon ; you can twist 
every thing.' 

" ' You see what a fellow he is,' said I, turning to the 
rector. ' If it comes to calling names, why I can do that 
too ; but let us be reasonable.' 

" He still roared and cursed ; he vowed he would never 
rest till he had destroyed Luther. 

" I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he 
pleased. I complained of his cursing me. 

" He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I 
ought to say so, and write against him. 

'' ' Why should I ? ' urged 1. ' The quarrel is none of 
mine. Why should I irritate Luther against me, when he 
has horns and knows how to use them ? ' 

" ' Well, then,' said he, ' if you will not write, at least you 
can say that we Dominicans have had the best of the argu- 
ment.' 

" ' Mow can I do that?' replied I. ' You have burnt his 
books, but I never heard that you had answered them.' 



106 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

" He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is 
to be a form of prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and 
Luther." 

But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the 
Sixth, who succeeded Leo, was his old school-fellow, and 
implored his assistance in terms which made refusal impos- 
sible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to Rome. 
Lie was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian 
required him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must 
comply. 

What was he to say ? 

" If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest," 
he wrote to the Pope's secretary, " and if he will not be 
too hard on Luther, I may, perhaiDS, do good ; but what 
Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption, the covetous- 
ness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not 
true." 

To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really 
remarkable. 

" I cannot go to your Holiness," he said ; " King Calculus 
will not let me. I have dreadful health, which this tornado 
has not improved. I, who was the favorite of every body, 
am now cursed by every body, — at Louvaine by the monks ; 
in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble 
in my old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, 
Come to Rome ; you might as well say to the crab, Fly. 
The crab says. Give me wings ; I say, Give me back my 
health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I 
shall be called lukewarm ; if I write as he does, I shall stir 
a hornet's nest. People think he can be put down by force. 
The more force you try, the stronger he wiP. grow. Such 
disorders cannot be cured in that way. The Wickliffites 
in England were put down, but the fire smouldered. 

" If you mean to use violence you have no need of me ; 
but mark this — if monks and theologians think only of 
themselves, no good will come of it. Look rather into the 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 107 

causes of all this confusion, and apply your remedies there. 
Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of Chris- 
tendom, and take their advice." 

Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You 
must relieve him of his infallibility if you want him to act 
like a sensible man. Adrian could undertake no reforms, 
and still besought Erasmus to take arms for him. 

Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger 
to himself and least injury to Luther. 

" I remember Uzzah, and am afraid," he said, in his quiz- 
zing way ; " it is not every one who is allowed to uphold 
the ark. Many a wise man has attacked Luther, and what 
has been effected ? The pope curses, the emperor threat- 
ens ; there are prisons, confiscations, fagots ; and all is 
vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do ? 



" The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miser- 
able monks have ruled all, entangling men's consciences 
for their own benefit. Dogma has been heaped on dogma. 
The bishops have been tyrants, the pope's commissaries 
have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of 
God's displeasure, like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the 
Caesars, and I shall not attack him on such grounds as 
these." 

Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the 
weak point of a bad cause. He would not declare for him, 
but he would not go over to his enemies. Yet, unless he 
quarreled with Adrian, he could not be absolutely silent ; 
so he chose a subject to write upon on which all schools 
of theology. Catholic or Protestant — all philosophers, all 
thinkers of whatever kind — have been divided from the 
beginning of time : fate and free-will, predestination and 
the liberty of man, — a problem which has no solution ; 
which may be argued even from eternity to eternity. 

The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus 



108 Ti7nes of Erasmus and Luther. 

wished to jilease the Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of 
course he pleased neither, and offended both. 

Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was need- 
lessly angry. Adrian and the monks were openly con- 
temptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels, he grew 
weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it. 

It is characteristic of Erasnuis that, like many highly 
gifted men, but unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope 
for sudden death, and declared it to be one of the greatest 
blessings which a human creature can receive. 

Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white 
feather to fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck 
bravely to his own proper work ; editing classics, editing 
the Fathers, writing paraphrases, — still doing for Europe 
what no other man could have done. 

The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. 
There was no living for him in Germany for the Protes- 
tants. He suffered dreadfully from the stone, too, and in 
all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued, for all 
that, to make life endurable. 

He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Phine. 
The lakes, the mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the 
hill slopes, delighted Erasmus when few people else cared 
for such things. He was particular about his wine. The 
vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins, and 
quickened his pen into brightness and life. 

The German wines he liked worse — for this point 
among others, which is curious to observe in those days. 
The great capitalist wine-growers, anti- Reformers all of 
them, were people without conscience and humanity, and 
adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They be- 
lieved in nothing but money, and this was the way to make 
money. 

" The water they mix with the wine," Erasmus says, " is 
the least part of the mischief They put in lime, and alum, 
and resin, and sulphur, and salt, — and then they say it is 
sood enough for heretics." 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 109 

Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. 
Show me a people where trade is dishonest, and I will 
show you a people where religion is a sham. 

'• AYe hang men that steal money," Erasmus exclaimed,, 
writing doubtless with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 
" These wretches steal our money and our lives too, and 
get off scot free." 

He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet 
reached, and tried to bury himself among his books. The 
shrieks of the conflict, however, still troubled his ears. 
He heard his own name still cursed, and he could not bear 
it or sit quiet under it. 

His correspondence was still enormous. The high pow- 
ers still appealed to him for advice and help. Of open 
meddling he would have no more ; he did not care, he said, 
to make a post of himself for every dog of a theologian to 
defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old 
style. 

" Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pul- 
pits with men who will kick controversy into the kennel, 
and preach piety and good manners. Teach nothing in 
the schools but what bears upon life and duty. Punish 
those who break the peace, and punish no one else ; and 
when the new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of 
conscience." 

Perfection of wisdom ; but a wisdom which, unfortu- 
nately, was three centuries at least out of date, which even 
now we have not grown big enough to profit by. The 
Catholic princes and bishops were at work with fire and 
fagot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, 
and turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The 
Catholics declared that Erasnuis was as much to blame as 
Luther. The Protestants held him responsible for the per- 
secutions, and insisted, not without reason, that if Erasmus 
had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world 
must have accepted the Reformation. 



110 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He 
loved quiet, and his ears were deafened with clamor. He 
liked popularity, and he was the best-abused person in 
Europe. Others who suffered in -the same way he could 
advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise ; 
but he could not follow his own counsel. When the curs 
were at his heels, he could not restrain himself from lash- 
ing out at them ; and, from his retreat at Basle, his sar- 
casms flashed out like jagged points of lightning. 

Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of 
a saint, " They insulted the poor image so," he said, " it is 
a marvel there was no miracle. The saint worked so many 
in the good old times." 

When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics 
exclaimed that Antichrist would be born from such an in- 
cestuous intercourse. " Nay," Erasmus said, " if monk 
and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been legions 
of Antichrists these many years." 

More than once he was tempted to go over openly to 
Luther — not from a noble motive, but, as he confessed, 
" to make those furies feel the difference between him and 
them." 

He was past sixty, with broken health and failing 
strength. He thought of going back to England, but 
England had by this time caught fire, and Basle had 
caught fire. There was no peace on earth. 

" The horse has his heels," he said, when advised to be 
quiet, " the dog his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee 
his sting. I myself have my tongue and my pen, and why 
should I not use them ? " 

Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a 
side, and, sorely tempted as he was, he could not. 

With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sym- 
pathized heartily ; but he did not understand Luther's doc- 
trine of faith, because he had none of his own, and he dis- 
liked it as a new dooma. 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. Ill 

He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of com- 
monplace revolution, caused by the folly and wickedness 
of the authorities, but Avith no organizing vitality in itself ; 
and his chief distress, as we gather from his later letters, 
was at his own treatment. He had done his best for both 
sides. He had failed, and was abused by every body. 

Thus passed away the last years of one of the most 
gifted men that Europe has ever seen. I have quoted 
many of his letters. I will add one more passage, written 
near the end of his life, very touching and pathetic : — 

" Hercules," he said, "could not fight two monsters at 
once ; while I, poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, 
scorpions every day at my sword's point ; not to mention 
smaller vermin — rats, mosquitoes, bugs, and fleas. My 
troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables 
or social gatherings, in churches and kings' courts, in pub- 
lic carriage or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and cal- 
umny defiles my name. Every goose now hisses at Eras- 
mus ; and it is worse than being stoned, once for all, like 
Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian. 

"They attack me now even for my Latin style, and 
spatter me with epigrams. Fame I would have parted 
with ; but to be the sport of blackguards — to be pelted 
with potsherds and dirt and ordure — is not this worse 
than death ? 

" There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join 
Luther ; and I cannot, for I cannot accept his doctrines. 
Sometimes I am stung with a desire to avenge my wrongs ; 
but I say to myself, ' Will you, to gratify your spleen, raise 
your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you 
at the font and fed you with the word of God ? ' I can- 
not do it. Yet I understand now how Arius, and Tertul- 
lian, and Wickliff were driven into schism. The theolo- 
gians say I am their enemy. Why ? Because I bade 
monks remember their vows ; because I told parsons to 
leave their wrancrlings and read the Bible ; because I told 



112 Times of Uraamus and Luther, 

popes and cardinals to look at the Apostles and make 
themselves more like to them. If this is to be their 
enemy, then indeed I have injured them." 

This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, 
and incessant toil had worn him to a shred. The clouds 
grew blacker. News came from England that his dear 
friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He 
had long ceased to care for life ; and death, almost as 
sudden as he had longed for, gave him peace at last. 

So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so 
many years ; and dying heaped with undeserved but too 
intelligible anathemas, seeing all that he had labored for 
swept away by the whirlwind. 

Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without 
Erasmus, Luther would have been impossible ; and Eras- 
mus really succeeded — so much of him as deserved to 
succeed — in Luther's victory. 

He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. 
His intellect was true to itself; and no worldly motives 
ever tempted him into insincerity. He was even far 
braver than he professed to be. Had he been brought to 
the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man 
who boasted louder of his courage. 

And yet, in his special scheme for remodeling the mind 
of Europe, he failed hopelessly — almost absurdly. He 
believed himself, that his work was spoilt by the Reforma- 
tion ; but, in fact, under no conditions could any more 
have come of it. 

Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists 
already ; and toleration and latitudinarianism are well 
enough when mind and conscience are awake and ener- 
getic of themselves. 

When there is no spiritual life at all ; when men live 
only for themselves and for sensual pleasure ; when relig- 
ion is superstition, and conscience a name, and God an 
idol half- feared and half-despised — then, for the restora- 



Times of Erasmus and iMther. 113 

tion of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed dif- 
ferent in kind from any which Erasmus possessed. 

And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all 
that Luther did ; it would be to tell you all the story of the 
German Reformation. I want you rather to consider the 
kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his character 
how he came to achieve what he did. 

You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the 
Diet of Worms, sent him to the Castle of Wartzburg, to 
prevent him from being murdered or kidnapped. He re- 
mained there many months ; and during that time the old 
ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like 
a North American forest. The monasteries were broken 
up ; the estates were appropriated by the nobles ; the 
monks were sent wandering into the world. The bishops 
looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual dominion 
was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector 
of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of 
the princes, declared for the Reformation. The Protest- 
ants had a majority in the Diet, and controlled the force 
of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy with his French 
wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to 
a crisis which he had not power to cope with ; and he was 
obliged for a time to recognize what he could not prevent. 
You would have thought Luther would have been well 
pleased to see the seed which he had sown bear fruit so 
rapidly ; yet it was exactly while all this was going on that 
he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he 
has left so wonderful an account. 

We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these 
apparitions. But Luther, it is quite certain, believed that 
Satan himself attacked him in person. Satan, he tells us, 
came often to him, and said, " See what you have done. 
Behold this ancient Church, this mother of saints, polluted 
and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you — you, a poor 
ignorant monk, that have set the people on to their unholy 



114 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

work. Are you so much wiser tlian the saints who approved 
the things which you have denounced ? Popes, bishops, 
clergy, kings, emperors, are none of these — are not all 
these together — wiser than Martin Luther the monk ? " 

The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these 
suggestions. He fell into deep fits of doubt and humilia- 
tion and despondency. And wherever these thoughts came 
from, we can only say that they were very natural thoughts 

— natural and right. He called them temptations ; yet 
these were temptations which would not have occurred to 
any but a high-minded man. 

He had, however, done only what duty had forced him 
to do. His business was to trust to God, who had begun 
the work and knew what He meant to make of it. His 
doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan, and 
his enormous imaginative vigor gave body to the voice 
which was speaking in him. 

He tells many humorous stories — not always producible 

— of the means with which he encountered his offensive 
visitor. 

" The devil," he says, " is very proud, and what he least 
likes is to be laughed at." One night he was disturbed by 
somethino^ rattlino^ in his room ; the modern unbeliever will 
suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit a candle, searched 
the apartment through, and could find nothing — the Evil 
One was indisputably there. 

" Oh ! " he said, " it is you, is it ? " He returned to bed, 
and wect to sleep. 

Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but 
remember that Luther had not the least doubt that he was 
alone in the room with the actual devil, who, if he could 
not overcome his soul, could at least twist his neck in a 
moment — and then think what courage there must have 
been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a 
presence ! 

During his retirement he translated the Bible. The 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 115 

confusion at last became so desperate that he could no 
longer be spared ; and, believing that he was certain to be 
destroyed, he left Wartzbiirg and returned to Wittenberg. 
Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He 
used to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if 
he died in his bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His 
friends said if he went there Duke George would kill 
him. 

" Duke George ! " he said ; " I would go to Leipsic if it 
rained Duke Georges for nine days ! " 

No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. 
The single one there was would have gladly been mischiev- 
ous if he could ; but Luther outlived him — lived for twenty- 
four years after this, in continued toil, reshaping the Ger- 
man Church, and giving form to its new doctrine. 

Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. 
The corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one 
root, the notion that the Christian priesthood possesses 
mystical power, conferred through episcopal ordination. 

Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in cer- 
tain things done to and for a man by a so-called priest. It 
was the devotion of each individual soul to the service of 
God. IMasses were nothing, and absolution was nothing ; 
and a clergyman differed only from a layman in being set 
apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching. 

I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this mat- 
ter. It is a matter of fact only, that in getting rid of 
episcopal ordination, he dried up the fountain from which 
the mechanical and idolatrous conceptions of religion had 
sprung ; and, in consequence, the religious life of Germany 
has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while priest- 
hoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which 
they live, and move, and have their beihg. 

Enough of this. 

The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe 
under Luther's name, is known as Justification by Faith. 



116 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

Bandied about as a watchword of party, it has by this time 
hardened into a fornuila, and has become barren as the 
soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by 
Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It ex- 
pressed what was, and is, and must be, in one language or 
another, to the end of time, the conviction of every gen- 
erous-minded man. 

The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, 
was a thing of desert and reward. So many good works 
done, so nuich to the right page in the great book ; where 
the stock proved insufficient, there was the reserve fund of 
the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for 
money to those who needed. 

" Merit ! " Luther thought. " What merit can there be 
in such a poor caitiff as man ? The better a man is, the 
more clearly he sees how^ little he is good for, the greater 
mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of having 
deserved reward." 

" Miserable creatures that we are ! " he said ; " we earn 
our bread in sin. Till we are seven years old, we do nothing 
but eat and drink and sleep and play ; from seven to twenty- 
one we study four hours a day, the rest of it we run about 
and amuse ourselves ; then we work till fifty, and then we 
grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives ; we 
give God a tenth of our time ; and yet we think that with 
our good works we can merit heaven. What have I been 
doing to-day ? I have talked for two hours ; I have been 
at meals three hours ; I have been idle four hours ! Ah, 
enter not into judgment with thy servant, Lord ! " 

A perpetual struggle. Forever to be falling, yet to rise 
again and stumble forv/ard with eyes turned to Heaven — 
this was the best which would ever come of man. It was 
accepted in its imperfection by the infinite grace of God, 
who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the intention for 
the deed ; who, when there is a sincere desire to serve 
Him, overlooks the short-comings of infirmity. 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 117 

Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty ? 
All doctrines, when petrified into formulas, lead to that. 
But, as Luther said, " Where real faith is, a good life fol- 
lows, as light follows the sun ; faint and clouded, yet ever 
struggling to break through the mist which enveloi^es it, 
and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear 
and raise it. 

" The barley," he says, in a homely but effective image, 
" the barley which we brew, the flax of which we weave 
our garments, nuist be bruised and torn ere they come to 
the use for which they are grown. So must Christians 
suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. 
The old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If 
man is to rise to nobleness, he must first be slain." 

In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same 
truth. " The natural man," he says, " is like the ore out of 
the iron mine. It is smelted in the furnace ; it is forcfed 
into bars upon the anvil. A new nature is at last forced 
upon it, and it is made steel." 

It was this doctrine — it was this truth rather (the word 
doctrine reminds one of quack medicines) — which, quick- 
ening in Luther's mind, gave Europe its new life. It was 
the flame which, beginning with a small spark, kindled the 
hearth-fires in every German household. 

Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He 
remained poor. He might have had money if he had 
wished ; but he chose rather, amidst his enormous labor, to 
work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood. 

He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, 
and delighted to encourage them. His table-talk, collected 
by his friends, makes one of the most brilliant books in the 
world. He had no monkish theories about the necessity 
of abstinence ; but he was temperate from habit and prin- 
ciple. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordi- 
nary meal ; and he was once four days without food of any 
sort, having emptied his larder among the poor. 



118 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. 
Flights of nuns from the dissolved convents came to him 
to provide for them — naked, shivering creatures, with 
scarce a ras: to cover them. Eight florins were wanted 
once to provide clothes for some of them. " Eight florins ! " 
he said ; " and where am I to get eight florins ? " Great 
people had made him presents of plate ; it all went to 
market, to be turned into clothes and food for the wretched. 

Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually 
very gentle and tolerant. He recognized, and was almost 
alone in recognizing, the necessity of granting liberty of 
conscience. No one hated Popery more than he did, yet 
he said, — 

" The PajDists must bear with us, and we with them. If 
they will not follow us, we have no right to force them. 
Wherever they can, they will hang, burn, behead, and 
strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I live, and 
most likely killed. But it must come to this at last — every 
man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, 
and answer for his belief to his Maker." 

Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in 
him : sometimes he wrote like an apostle, sometimes like a 
raving ribald. 

Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When 
he was angry, invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks 
down a mountain torrent in flood. We need not admire all 
that ; in quiet times it is hard to understand it. 

Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the 
Eighth, who began life as a highly orthodox sovereign, 
broke a lance with Luther for the Papacy. 

Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which 
was probably his own after all. He thought the king was 
put forward by some of the English bishops ; " Thomists," 
he calls them, as men who looked for the beginning and 
end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. 

" Courage," he exclaimed to them, " swine that you are ! 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 119 

burn me then, if you can and dare. Here I am ; do your 
worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to all the winds ; spread 
them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you still. 
Living, I am the foe of the Papacy ; and dead, I will be its 
foe twice over. Hogs of Thomists ! Luther shall be the 
bear in your way, the lion in your path. Go where you 
will, Luther shall cross you. Luther shall leave you neither 
peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows of brass 
and dashed out your iron brains." 

Strong expressions ; but the times were not gentle. 
The prelates whom he supposed himself to be addressing 
were the men who filled our Smithfield with the reek of 
burninpf human flesh. 

Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of 
Nature herself, — terrible when roused ; and in repose, 
majestic and beautiful. Of vanity he had not a trace. 
" Do not call yourselves Lutherans," he said ; " call your- 
selves Christians. Who and what is Luther ? Has Luther 
been crucified for the world ? " 

I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns 
were the expression of the very inmost heart of the Ger- 
man people. " Music " he called " the grandest and sweet- 
est gift of God to man." " Satan hates music," he said ; 
" he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us." 

He was extremely interested in all natural things. Be- 
fore the science of botany was dreamt of, Luther had di- 
vined the principle of vegetable life. " The principle of 
marriage runs through all creation," he said ; " and flowers 
as well as aninials are male and female." 

A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him ; beau- 
tiful sometimes as a finished piece of poetry. 

One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he 
exclaimed, — 

" Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world 
makes all alive again. See those shoots, how they burgeon 
and swell ! Imaije of the resurrection of the dead ! Winter 



120 Times of Erasmus and Luther. 

is death ; summer is the resurrection. Between them lie 
spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and change. 
The proverb says, — 

" ' Trust not a day 
Ere birth of May.' 

Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our 
daily bread." 

" We are in the dawn of a new era," he said another 
time ; " we are beginning to think something of the natural 
world which was ruined in Adam's fall. We are learning 
to see all round us the greatness and glory of the Creator. 
We can see the Almighty hand — the infinite goodness — 
in the humblest flower. We praise Him, we thank Him, 
we glorify Him ; we recognize in creation the power of His 
word. He spoke and it was there. The stone of the peach 
is hard ; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it when the 
time comes. An egg — what a thing is that ! If an egg 
had never been seen in Europe, and a traveller had 
brought one from Calcutta, how would all the world have 
wondered ! " 

And again : — 

" If a man could make a single rose, we should give him 
an empire ; yet roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are 
scattered in profusion over the world, and no one regards 
them." 

There are infinite other things which I should like to tell 
you about Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what 
more I have to say to a single matter, for which more than 
any other he has been blamed ; I mean his marriage. 

He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of cel- 
ibacy. The person whom he married had been a nun, and 
as such had taken a vow of celibacy also. 

The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. 
Luther had come to middle age when it was brought about, 
when temptations of that kind lose their power ; and among 
the many accusations which have been brought against his 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 121 

early life, no one has ventured to charge him with inconti- 
nence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately 
performed ; and it was either meant as a public insult to 
established ecclesiastical usage, or else he considered that 
the circumstances of the time required it of him. 

Let us see Avhat those circumstances were. The enforce- 
ment of celibacy on the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, 
both iniquitous in itself and productive of enormous im- 
morality. The impurity of the religious orders had been 
the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the 
distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Lu- 
ther himself was impressed with profound pity for the poor 
men, wiio were cut off from the natural companionship 
which Nature had provided for them ; who were thus ex- 
posed to temptations which they ought not to have been 
called upon to resist. 

The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously 
complicated the problem. Germany was covered with 
friendless and homeless men and women adrift upon the 
world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do ; and 
advice was of little service without example. 

The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such 
persons. They might have lived together in concubinage, 
and no one would have thouo^ht miich about it. Their 
marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a kind 
of incest. 

Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the 
natural and healthy state in which clergy as well as laity 
were intended to live. Immorality was hateful to him as a 
degradation of a sacrament, — impious, loathsome, and dis- 
honored. Marriage was the condition in which humanity 
was at once purest, best, and happiest. 

For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He 
had borne the injustice of his lot when the burden had 
been really heavy. But time and custom had lightened 
the load ; and had there been nothing: at issue but his own 



122 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

personal happiness, he would not have given further occa- 
sion to the malice of his enemies. 

But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to 
him to guide them ; guide them by precept, or guide them 
by example. He had satisfied himself that the vow of cel- 
ibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him and them ; 
that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the 
devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him ; that it 
was no use to tell others that they might marry, unless he 
himself led the way, and married first. And it was char- 
acteristic of him that, having resolved to do the thing, he 
did it in the way most likely to show the world his full 
thought upon the matter. 

That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt 
whatever. 

" We may be able to live unmarried," he said ; " but in 
these days we must protest in deed as well as word against 
the doctrine of celibacy. It is an invention of Satan. Be- 
fore I took my wife, I had made up my mind that I must 
marry some one ; and had I been overtaken by illness, I 
should have betrothed myself to some pious maiden." 

He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be 
suspected, the moderate, respectable people, — the people 
who thought like Erasmus, — those who wished well to 
what was good, but wished also to stand well with the 
world's opinion, — such persons as these would have over- 
whelmed him with remonstrances. "When you marry," he 
said to a friend in a similar situation, " be quiet about it, or 
mountains will rise between you and your wishes. If I had 
not been swift and secret, I should have had the whole 
world in my way." 

Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, 
was a nun of good family, left homeless and shelterless by 
the l)reaking-up of her convent. She was an ordinary, un- 
imaginative body, plain in person and plain in mind, in no 
sense whatever a heroine of romance, but a decent, sensi- 
ble, commonplace Haus Frau. 



Times of JErasmiis and Luther, 123 

The age of romance was over with both of them ; yet, 
for all that, never marriage brought a plainer blessing with 
it. They began with respect, and ended with steady affec- 
tion. 

The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a 
pious, good wife ; in peace and quiet, contented with a 
little, and giving God thanks. 

He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he 
called her, was not clever, and he had humorous stories to 
tell of the beginning of their adventures together. 

" The first year of married life is an odd business," he 
says. " At meals, where you used to be alone, you are 
yourself and somebody else. When you wake in the morn- 
ing, there are a pair of tails close to you on the pillow. 
My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She 
thought she ought not to be silent. She did not know 
what to say, so she would ask me, — 

" ' Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in 
Prussia the brother of the Margrave ? ' " 

She was an odd woman. 

" Doctor," she said to him one day, " how is it that under 
Popery we prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our 
prayers are cold and seldom ? " 

Katie might have spoken for herself Luther, to the 
last, spent hours of every day in prayer. He advised her 
to read the Bible a little more. She said she had read 
enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. " Ah ! " he 
said, "here begins weariness of the word of God. One 
day new lights will rise up, and the Scriptures will be de- 
spised and be flung away into the corner." 

His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. 
The recollection of his own boyhood made him especially 
gentle with them, and their fancies and imaginations de- 
lighted him. 

Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. " Chil- 
dren," he said, " imagine heaven a place where rivers run 



124 Times of Eras7nus and Luther, 

with cream, and trees are hung with cakes and plums. Do 
not blame them. They are but showing their simple, nat- 
ural, unquestioning, all-believing faith." 

One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, 
the children were watching it with longing eyes. " That 
is the way," he said, " in which we grown Christians ought 
to look for the Judgment Day." 

His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. 
He speaks of his loss with the unaffected simplicity of nat- 
ural grief, yet with the faith of a man who had not the 
slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was passing. 
Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor 
the other disguised or suppressed. 

You will have gathered something, I hope, from these 
faint sketches, of what Luther was ; you will be able to see 
how far he deserves to be called, by our modern new lights, 
a Philistine or a heretic. We will now return to the sub- 
ject with which we began, and resume, in a general con- 
clusion, the argument of these Lectures. 

In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words. 

One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, 
or, knowing him, should not have treated him with more 
forbearance. 

Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. 
He interceded for him, defended him, and only with the 
utmost reluctance was driven into controversy with him. 

Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who 
was false to his convictions ; who played with truth ; who, 
in his cold, sarcastic skepticism, believed in nothing — 
scarcely even in God. He was unaware of own his obliga- 
tions to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would 
trumpet out his own good deeds. 

Thus Luther says : — 

" All you who honor Christ, I pray yow hate Erasmus. 
He is a scoffer and a mocker. He speaks in riddles ; and 
jests at Popery and Gospel, and Christ and God, with his 



Times of Erasmus and Luther. 125 

uncertain speeches. He might have served the Gospel if 
he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man 
with a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes ; 
and I say with Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He 
thinks we should trim to the times, and hang our cloaks to 
the wind. He is himself his own first object ; and as he 
lived, he died. 

" I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has 
had for a thousand years. Intellect does not understand 
religion, and, when it comes to the things of God, it laughs 
at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by and by he will say, 
Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we 
counted for folly. 

" I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats 
theology as a fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for 
the ignorant to believe." 

Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and un- 
true. Erasmus knew many things which it would have 
been well for Luther to have known ; and, as a man. he 
was better than his principles. 

But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory 
of human things which Erasmus represented, between that 
creed and Luther there is, and must be, an eternal antag- 
onism. 

If to be true in heart and just in act are the first quali- 
ties necessary for the elevation of humanity ; if without 
these all else is worthless, intellectual culture cannot give 
what intellectual culture does not require or imply. You 
cultivate the plant which has already life ; you will waste 
your labor in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the 
counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, 
and alike visible only in its effects. 

Intellectual gifts are like gifls of strength, or wealth, or 
rank, or worldly power, — splendid instruments if nobly 
used, but requiring qualities to use them nobler and better 
than themselves. 



126 Times of Erasmus and Luther, 

The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. 
The clever man may live for intellectual enjoyment, — re- 
fined enjoyment it may be, but enjoyment still, and still 
centring in self. 

If the spirit of Erasmus had jDrevailed, it would have 
been with modern Europe as with the Roman Empire in 
its decay. The educated would have been mere skeptics ; 
the multitude would have been sunk in superstition. In 
both alike all would have perished which deserves the name 
of manliness. 

And this leads me to the last observation that I have to 
make to you. In the sciences, the philosopher leads ; the 
rest of us take on trust what he tells us. The spiritual 
progress of mankind has followed the opposite course. 
Each forward step has been made first among the people, 
and the last converts have been among the learned. 

The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences 
there is no temptation of self-interest to mislead. In mat- 
ters which affect life and conduct, the interests and preju- 
dices of the cultivated classes are enlisted on the side of 
the existing order of things, and their better-trained facul- 
ties and larger acquirements serve only to find them argu- 
ments for believing what they wish to believe. 

Simpler men have less to lose ; they come more in con- 
tact with the realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the 
experience of suffering. 

Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned 
away from Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake 
listened, and a new life began for mankind. A miner's son 
converted Germany to the Reformation. The London arti- 
sans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire went to the 
stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a 
second revelation. 

So it has been ; so it will b6 to the end. When a great 
teacher comes again upon the earth, he will find his first 
disciples where Christ found them and Luther found them. 



Times of Erasmus and Luther, 127 

Had Luther written for the learned, the words which 
changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in im- 
potence on the book-shelves. 

In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I 
think, with me, that he did well and not ill ; you will not 
sacrifice his great name to the disdain of a shallow philos- 
ophy, or to the grimacing of a dead superstition, whose 
ghost is struggling out of its grave. 



THE 

INFLUENCE OF THE EEFORMATION 

ON THE 

SCOTTISH CHARACTER: 

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER, 1865. 



I HAVE undertaken to speak this evening on the effects 
of the Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a 
very bold person to have come here on any such undertak- 
ing. In the first place, the subject is one with which it is 
presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great national 
movements can only be understood properly by the people 
whose disposition they represent. We say ourselves about 
our own history that only Englishmen can properly com- 
prehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen once said to me of 
our own Reformation in England, that, for his part, he 
could not conceive how we had managed to come by such 
a thing. We seemed to him to be an obdurate, impene- 
trable, stupid people, hide-bound by tradition and prece- 
dent, and too self-satisfied to be either vvilling or able to 
take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever, 
especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get 
inside the English mind. He did not know that some peo- 
ple go furthest and go fastest when they look one way and 
row the other. It is the same with every considerable na- 
tion. They work out their own political and spiritual lives 
through tempers, humors, and passions peculiar to them- 



The Influence of the Reformation^ etc. 129 

selves ; and the same disposition which produces the result 
is required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason 
why I should feel diffident about what I have undertaken. 
Another is, that I do not conceal from myself that the sub- 
ject is an exceedingly delicate one. The blazing passions 
of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are no 
longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of 
those times can now be told or listened to with something 
like impartiality. Yet, if people no longer hate each other 
for such matters, the traditions of the struggle survive in 
strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to wound 
without intending it. 

My own conviction with respect to all great social- and 
religious convulsions is the extremely commonplace one, 
that much is to be said on both sides. I believe that no- 
where and at no time any such struggle can take place on 
a large scale, unless each party is contending for some- 
thing which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the 
right is plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all 
on one side ; and only rogues and fools are on the other. 
Where the wise and good are divided, the truth is gener- 
ally found to be divided also. But this is precisely what 
cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men 
besjin to fiorht about thincrg when reason and argument fail 
to convince them. They make up in passion what is want- 
ing in logic. Each side believes that all the right is theirs 
— that their enemies have all the bad qualities which their 
language contains names for ; and even now, on the subject 
on which I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up 
any magazine, review, newspaper, or party organ of any 
kind which touches on it, to see that opinion is still Whig 
or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or Catholic, as 
the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither 
wholly one, nor wholly the other is in the position of Ham- 
let's " baser nature," " between the incensed points of 
mighty opposites." He is the Laodicean, neither cold nor 
9 



130 The Influence of the Reformation 

hot, whom decent people consider bad company. He 
pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all. 

Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either 
not com.e here at all, or else should have chosen some 
other matter to talk about. In excuse for persisting, I can 
but say that the subject is one about which I have been 
led by circumstances to read and think considerably ; and 
though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about him- 
self and his own affairs than any one else can possibly 
know, yet a stranger's eye will sometimes see things which 
escape those more immediately interested : and I allow 
myself to hope that I may have something to say not 
altogether undeserving your attention. I shall touch as 
little as possible on questions of opinion ; and if I tread 
by accident on any sensitive point, I must trust to your 
kindness to excuse my awkwardness. 

Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in 
the first quarter of the sixteenth century, we see a country 
in which the old feudal organization continued, so far as it 
generally affected the people, more vigorous than in any 
other part of civilized Europe. Elsewhere, the growth of 
trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with 
an organization of their own, independent of the lords. 
In Scotland, the towns were still scanty and poor ; such as 
they were, they were for the most part under the control 
of the great nobleman who happened to live nearest to 
them ; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords, 
knights, abbots, or j^relates, under whose rule they were 
born, had as yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and 
the soil was very miserably tilled) lived under the shadow 
of the castle or the monastery. They followed their lord's 
fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his politics, and 
supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as the 
case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life 
of those times. The loyal attachment of man to man — 
of liege servant to liege lord — of all forms under which 



on the Scottish Character. 131 

human beings can live and work together, has most of 
grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without 
mutual confidence and affection — mutual benefits given 
and received. The length of time which tlie system 
lasted, proves that in the main there must have been a fine 
fidelity in the people — truth, justice, generosity in their 
leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out 
of those times ; just as in these islands nowadays, you may 
find bad instances of the abuses of rights of property. 
You may find stories — too many also — of husbands ill- 
using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay 
the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of 
property, on the whole, does more harm than good. I do 
not doubt that down in that feudal system somewhere lie 
the roots of some of the finest qualities in the European 
peoples. 

So much for the temporal side of the matter ; and the 
spiritual was not very unlike it. As no one lived independ- 
ently, in our modern sense of the word, so no one thought 
independently. The minds of men were looked afler by a 
Church, which, for a long time, also, did, I suppose, very 
largely fulfill the purpose for which it was intended. It 
kept alive and active the belief that the world was created 
and governed by a just Being, who hated sins and crimes, 
and steadily punished such things. It taught men that 
they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of life was 
an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. 
It taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal 
which we now consider to have been a mistake — a great 
many theories of earthly things which have since passed 
away, and special opinions clothed in outward forms and 
ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do 
not think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes 
like these are hurtful only when persisted in in the face of 
fuller truth, after truth has been discovered. Only a very 
foolish man would now uphold the Ptolemaic astronomy. 



132 The Influence of the Reformation 

But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented, was 
based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a 
groundwork without which further progress in that science 
would have been probably impossible. The theories and 
ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited well with an 
age in which little was known and much was imagined : 
when superstition was active and science was not yet born. 
When I am told here or anywhere that the Middle Ages 
were times of mere spiritual darkness and priestly oppres- 
sion, with the other usual formulas, I say, as I said before, 
if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that it 
reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better 
than the thing which we see in the generation which imme- 
diately preceded the Reformation, it could not have existed 
at all. You might as well argue that the old fading tree 
could never have been green and young. Institutions do 
not live on lies. They either live by the truth and useful- 
ness which there is in them, or they do not live at all. 

So things went on for several hundred years. There 
were scandals enough, and crimes enough, and feuds, and 
murders, and civil wars. Systems, however good, cannot 
prevent evil. They can but compress it within moderate 
and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that, 
measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the 
people, the mediaeval institutions were very well suited for 
the inhabitants of these countries as they then were. 
Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could hardly have 
mended them if they had tried. 

But times change, and good things as well as bad grow 
old and have to die. The heart of the matter whicli the 
Catholic Church had taught was the fear of God ; but the 
language of it and the formulas of it, were made up of 
human ideas and notions about things which the mere in- 
crease of human knowledge gradually made incredible. 
To trace the reason of this would lead us a long way. It 
is intelligible enough, but it would take us into subjects 



on the Scottish Character. 133 

better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while the 
essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it 
is expressed changes and has changed — changes as living 
languages change and become dead, as institutions change, 
as forms of government change, as opinion on all things in 
heaven and earth change, as half the theories held at this 
time among ourselves will probably change — that is, the 
outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic for- 
mulas, instead of living symbols, became dead and power- 
less cabalistic signs. The religion lost its hold on the con- 
science and the intellect, and the effect, singularly enough, 
appeared in the shepherds before it made itself felt among 
the flocks. From the See of St. Peter to the far monas- 
teries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were 
shocked and scandalized at the outrageous doings of high 
cardinals, prelates, priests, and monks. It was clear 
enough that these great personages themselves did not 
believe what they taught ; so why should the people believe 
it ? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a liv- 
ing reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. 
The first steps everywhere were taken v/ith extreme reluc- 
tance ; and had the popes and cardinals been wise, they 
would have taken the lead in the inquiry, cleared their 
teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life 
both for it, and for themselves. An infallible pope and an 
infallible council might have done something in this way, 
if good sense had been among the attributes of their om- 
niscience. What they did do was something very different. 
It was as if, when the new astronomy began to be taught, 
the professors of that science in all the universities of 
Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's 
cycles and epicycles were eternal verities ; that the theory 
of the rotation of the earth was and must be a damnable 
heresy ; and had invited the civil authorities to help them 
in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, 
or something very like it, was the position taken up in 



134 The Influence of the Reformation 

theology by the Council of Trent. The bishops assembled 
there did not reason. They decided by vote that certain 
things were true, and were to be believed ; and the only 
arguments which they condescended to use were fire and 
fagot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this 
experiment of theirs, we all know tolerably well. 

The effect was very different in different countries. 
Here, in Scotland, the failure was most marked and com- 
plete, but the way in which it came about was in many 
ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by 
princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly 
mixed itself up with politics and questions of rival juris- 
diction. Both in England and Germany, the Revolution, 
wherever it established itself, was accepted early by the 
Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognized. 
Here, it was far otherwise : the Protestantism of Scotland 
was the creation of the commons, as in turn the commons 
may be said to have been created by Protestantism. There 
were many young high-spirited men, belonging to the no- 
blest families in the country, who were among the earliest 
to rally round the Reforming preachers ; but authority, 
both in Church and State, set the other way. The congre- 
gations w^ho gathered in the fields around Wishart and 
John Knox were, for the most part, farmers, laborers, arti- 
sans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry ; and thus, for the 
first time in Scotland, there was created an organization of 
men detached from the lords and from the Church — brave, 
noble, resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred 
cause unrecognized by the leaders whom they had followed 
hitherto with undoubting allegiance. That spirit which 
grew in time to be the ruling power of Scotland — that 
which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and deter- 
mined its after-fortunes as a nation — had its first germ in 
these half-outlawed wanderinor conoreo;ations. In this it 
was that the Reformation in Scotland differed from the 
Reformation in any other part of Europe. Elsewhere 



on the Scottish Character. 135 

is found a middle class existing — created already by trade 
or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did 
not materially affect their political condition. In Scotland 
the commons, as an organized body, were simply created 
by religion. Before the Reformation they had no political 
existence ; and therefore it has been that the print of their 
orio-in has gone so deeply into their social constitution. On 
them, and them only, the burden of the work of the Ref- 
ormation was eventually thrown ; and when they tri- 
umphed at last, it was inevitable that both they and it 
should react one- upon the other. 

How this came about I must endeavor to describe, al- 
though I can give but a brief sketch of an exceedingly 
complicated matter. Every body knows the part played 
by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward revolution, 
when the Reformation first became the law of the land. 
It would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of 
the whole nation — as if it had been a thing on which 
high and low were heartily united. Yet on the first glance 
below the surface you see that the greater part of the no- 
ble lords concerned in that business cared nothing about 
the Reformation at all ; or, if they cared, they rather dis- 
liked it than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act 
as they did ? or, how came they to permit a change of such 
magnitude when they had so little sympathy with it ? I 
must make a slight circuit to look for the explanation. 

The one essentially noble feature in -the great families of 
Scotland was their patriotism. . They loved Scotland and 
Scotland's freedom with a passion proportioned to the diffi- 
culty with which they had defended their liberties ; and yet 
the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner or later, 
union with England was inevitable ; and the question was, 
how that union^vas to be brought about — how they were 
to make sure that, when it came, they should take their 
place at England's side as equals, and not as a dependency. 
It had been arranged that the little Mary Stuart should 



136 The Influence of the Reformation 

marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to 
be settled so. They would have been contented, they said, 
if Scotland had had the " lad " and England the '' lass." 
As it stood, they broke their bargain, and married the lit- 
tle queen away into France, to prevent the Protector Som- 
erset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared 
an opposite danger ; the queen would become a French- 
woman ; her French mother governed Scotland with 
French troops and French ministers ; the country would 
become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. 
Thus an English party began again ; and as England was 
then in the middle of her great anti- Church revolution, so 
the Scottish nobles began to be anti-Church. It was not 
for doctrines : neither they nor their brothers in England 
cared much about doctrines ; but in both countries the 
Church was rich — much richer than there seemed any 
occasion for it to be. Harry the Eighth had been sharing 
among the laity the spoils of the English monasteries ; 
the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability 
of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary 
of Guise and the French stood by the Church, and the 
Church stood by them ; and so it came about that the 
great families — even those who, like the Hamiltons, were 
most closely connected with France — were tempted over 
by the bait to the other side. They did not want reformed 
doctrines, but they wanted the Church lands ; and so they 
came to patronize, 6r endure, the Reformers, because the 
Church hated them, and because they weakened the 
Church ; and thus for a time, and especially as long as 
^fary Stuart was Queen of France, all classes in Scotland, 
high and low, seemed to fraternize in favor of the revolu- 
tion. 

And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be 
effected at last, at the same juncture, and in connection 
with the same movement. Next in succession to the 
Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of Hamil- 



on the Scottish Charaeter. 137 

ton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, 
was supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of 
the Hamiltons was of her own age, and in years past had 
been thought of for her by her father. What could be 
more fit than to make a match between those two ? Send 
a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some 
pretext to shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her 
native country, and so join the crowns, the " lass " and the 
" lad " being now in the right relative position. Scotland 
Avould thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a new 
dynasty. 

I seem to be straying from the point; but these political 
schemes had so much to do with the actions of the leading 
men at that time, that the story of the Reformation cannot 
be understood without them. It was thus, and with these 
incongruous objects, that the combination was formed 
which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, 
confiscated its possessions, destroyed its religious houses, 
and changed its creed. . The French were driven away 
from Leith by Elizabeth's troops ; the Reformers took pos- 
session of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met 
with a clear stage to determine for themselves the future 
fate of the country. Now, I think it certain that, if the 
Scotch nobility, having once accepted the Reformation, had 
continued loyal to it, — especially if Elizabeth had met 
their wishes in the important point of the marriage, — the 
form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something ex- 
tremely different from what it in fact became. The people 
were perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders 
if the matters on which their hearts were set had received 
tolerable consideration from th«m. and the democratic form 
of the ecclesiastical constitution would have been inevitably 
modified. One of the conditions of the proposed compact 
with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy 
and the English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, 
and witli fair dealing, would not have been found impossible. 



138 The Influence of the Reformation 

But it soon became clear that the religious interests of 
Scotland were the very last thing which would receive con- 
sideration from any of the high political personages con- 
cerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like 
that which he had seen working under Calvin at Geneva — 
a constitution in which the clergy as ministers of God 
should rule all things ; rule politically at the council board, 
and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made plain 
to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. " Eh, mon," said 
the younger Maitland to him, " then we may all bear the 
barroAV now to build the House of the Lord." Not exactly. 
The churches were left to the ministers ; the worldly good 
things and worldly power remained with the laity ; and as 
to religion, circumstances would decide what they would do 
about that. Again, I am not speaking of all the great men 
of those times. Glencairn, Ruthven, young Argyll — above 
all, the Earl of Moray — really did in some degree interest 
themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was 
perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he 
called religion " a bogle of the nursery." That was the ex- 
pression which a Scotch statesman of those days actually 
ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable, no 
doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on 
the side of the Reformation. But here, too, there was a 
serious hitch. Elizabeth would not marry Arran. Eliza- 
beth would be no party to any of their intrigues. She de- 
tested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in all 
shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the 
nobles on one side, she affronted the people on another ; 
and all idea of uniting the two crowns after the fashion 
proposed by the Scotch Parliament she utterly and entirely 
repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far as this 
was concerned ; but she lefl the ruling families extremely 
perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They 
had allowed the country to be revolutionized in the teeth 
of their own sovereign, and what to do next they did not 
very well know. 



on the Scottish Character. 139 

It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their 
help. Francis the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a 
childless widow. Her connection with the croAvn of France 
was at an end, and all danger on that side to the liberties 
of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having 
failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to 
play for the English crown ; as good as he, or better, for 
she would have the English Catholics on her side. So, 
careless how it would affect religion, and making no condi- 
tion at all about that, the same men who a year before were 
ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, nov/ invited 
her back to Scotland ; the same men who had been the 
loudest friends of Elizabeth now encouraged Mary Stuart 
to persist in the pretension to the crown of England, which 
had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had 
assumed the title of Queen of England. She had prom- 
ised to abandon it, but, finding her own people ready to 
support her in withdrawing her promise, she stood out, 
insisting that at all events the English Parliament should 
declare her next in the succession ; and it was well known 
that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favor, 
some rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into 
Elizabeth. The object of the Scotch nobles was political, 
national, patriotic. For religion it was no great matter 
either way ; and as they had before acted with the Protest- 
ants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly or 
tacitly act with the Catholics. INIary Stuart's friends in 
England and on the Continent were Catholics, and there- 
fore it would not do to offend them. First, she was allowed 
to have mass at Ilolyrood ; then there was a move for a 
broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more 
terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the 
country, and he had perfectly good reason for saying so. 
He thoroughly understood that it was the first step towards 
a counter-revolution which in time would cover all Scotland 
and England, and carry them bar.k to Popery. Yet he 



140 Tlie Influence of the Reformation 

preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched 
with the notion of the English succession, that for a year 
and a half he ceased to speak to Knox ; and as it was with 
Murray, so it was far more with all -the rest ; their zeal for 
religion was gone no one knew where. Of course Eliza- 
beth would not give way. She might as well, she said, her- 
self prepare her shroud ; and then conspiracies came, and 
underground intrigues with the Romanist English noble- 
men. France and Spain were to invade England; Scot- 
land was to open its ports to their fleets, and its soil to their 
armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a 
dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland 
had remained unchanged from what it had been, — had the 
direction of its fortunes remained with the prince and with 
the nobles, sooner or later it would have come to this. But 
suddenly it appeared that there was a new power in this 
country which no one suspected till it was felt. 

The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creat- 
ures of the nobles. They had neither will nor opinion of 
their own. They thought and acted in the spirit of their 
immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt that 
there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once 
the great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it 
appeared, when the pressure came, that religion, which was 
the plaything of the nobles, was to the people a clear mat- 
ter of life and death. They might love their country ; they 
might be proud of any thing which would add lustre to its 
crown ; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery, 
— if it threatened to bring them back, — if it looked that 
way, they would have nothing to do with it ; nor would 
they allow it to be done. Allegiance was well enough ; 
but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered 
which superseded all earthly considerations. I know noth- 
ing finer in Scottish history than the way in which the 
commons of the Lowlands took their places by the side of 
Knox in the great convulsions which followed. If all others 



on the Scottish Character, 141 

forsook him, they at least would never forsake him while 
tongue remained to sjDeak and hand remained to strike. 
Broken they might have been, trampled out as the Hugue- 
nots at last were trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart 
been less than the most imprudent or the most unlucky of 
sovereigns. But Providence, or the folly of those with 
whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not follow 
the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which 
Mary Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is 
her own share, be it great or small, or none at all, in those 
crimes, of any moment to us here. It is enough that, both 
before that strange business and after it, when at Holyrood 
or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever- 
favorite dream was still the English throne. Her road 
towards it was through a Catholic revolution and the nmr- 
der of Elizabeth. It is enough that, both before and after, 
the aristocracy of Scotland, even those among them who 
had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager 
to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom 
Knox had raised into a political power, remained true. 

Much, indeed, is to be said for the Scotch nobles. In 
the first shock of the business at Kirk-o'-Field, they forgot 
their politics in a sense of national disgrace. They sent 
the queen to Loch Leven. They intended to bring her to 
trial, and, if she was proved guilty, to expose and perhaps 
punish her. All parties for a time agreed in this, even the 
Hamiltons themselves ; and had they been left alone they 
would have done it. But they had a perverse neighbor in 
England, to whom crowned heads were sacred. Elizabeth, 
it might have been thought, would have had no particular 
objection ; but Elizabeth had aims of her own which baffled 
calculation. Elizabeth, the representative of revolution, 
yet detested revolutionists. The Reformers in Scotland, 
the Huguenots in France, the insurgents in the United 
Provinces, were the only friends she had in Europe. For 
her own safety she was obliged to encourage them ; yet 



142 The Influence of the Reformation 

she hated them all, and would at any moment have aban- 
doned them all, if in any other way she could have secured 
herself. She might have conquered her personal objection 
to Knox ; she could not conquer her aversion to a Church 
which rose out of revolt against authority, which was demo- 
cratic in constitution and republican in politics. When 
driven into alliance with the Scotch Protestants, she an- 
grily and passionately disclaimed any community of creed 
with them ; and for subjects to sit in judgment on their 
prince was a precedent which she would not tolerate. 
Thus she flung her mantle over Mary Stuart. She told 
the Scotch Council here in Edinburgh that, if they hurt a 
hair of her head, she would harry their country, and hang 
them all on the trees round the town, if she could find any 
trees there for that purpose. She tempted the queen to 
England with her fair promises after the battle of Lang- 
side, and then, to her astonishment, imprisoned her. Yet 
she still shielded her reputation, still fostered her party in 
Scotland, still incessantly threatened and incessantly en- 
deavored to restore her. She kept her safe, because, in 
her lucid intervals, her ministers showed her the madness 
of acting otherwise. Yet for three years she kept her own 
people in a fever of apprehension. She made a settled 
government in Scotland impossible ; till, distracted and 
perplexed, the Scottish statesmen went back to their first 
schemes. They assured themselves that in one way or 
other the Queen of Scots would sooner or later come again 
among them. They, and others besides them, believed 
that Elizabeth was cutting her own throat, and that the 
best that they could do was to recover their own queen's 
favor, and make the most of her and her titles ; and so 
they lent themselves again to the English Catholic con- 
spiracies. 

The Earl of Moray — the one supremely noble man then 
living in the country — was put out of the way by an as- 
sassin. French and Spanish money poured in, and French 



on the Scottish Character. 143 

and Spanish armies were to be again invited over to Scot- 
land. This is the form in which the drama unfolds itself 
in the correspondence of the time. Maitland, the soul and 
spirit of it all, said, in scorn, that " he would make the 
Queen of England sit upon her tail and whine like a 
whipped dog." The only powerful noblemen who remained 
on the Protestant side were Lennox, Morton, and Mar. 
Lord Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon dispatched ; 
Mar was old and weak ; and Morton was an unprincipled 
scoundrel, who used the Reformation only as a stalking- 
horse to cover the spoils which he had clutched in the con- 
fusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any moment 
if the balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers 
of the Kirk were fooled and flattered over. Maitland told 
Mary Stuart that he had gained them all except one. 

John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persua- 
sions. Good reason has Scotland to be proud of Knox. 
He only, in this wild crisis, saved the Kirk which he had 
founded, and saved with it Scottish and English freedom. 
But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost 
certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been 
landed on the eastern coast. The conditions were drawn 
out and agreed upon for the reception, the support, and the 
stay of the Spanish troops. Two thirds of the English 
peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth, 
and Alva w^aited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only 
that quiet would not be. Instead of quiet came three 
dreadful years of civil war. Scotland was split into fac- 
tions, to which the mother and the son gave names. The 
queen's lords, as they were called, with nnlimited money 
from France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow ; 
all the border line was theirs, and all the north and west. 
Elizabeth's Council, wiser than their mistress, barely 
squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to keep 
Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but 
there her assistance ended. She would still say nothing, 



144 The Influence of the Reformation 

promise nothing, bind herself to nothing, and, so far as she 
was concerned, the war would have been soon enough 
brought to a close.. But away at St. Andrews, John 
Knox, broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the 
pulpit stairs, still thundered in the parish church ; and 
his voice, it was said, was like ten thousand trumpets bray- 
ing; in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the Low- 
lands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found 
in the man of religion a match for the man of honor. Be- 
fore Cromwell, all over the Lothians, and across from St. 
Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow, — through farm, and 
town and village, — the words of Knox had struck the in- 
most chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing 
over knight and noble, he had touched the farmer, the 
peasant, the petty tradesman, and the artisan, and turned 
the men of clay into men of steel. The village preacher, 
when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned 
morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household 
became for the nonce a band of troopers, who would cross 
swords with the night riders of Buccleuch. It was a ter- 
rible time, a time rather of anarchy than of defined war, 
for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was 
everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women 
and children tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings 
of poor men were dangled day after day from the walls of 
Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from Elizabeth would 
have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never speak ; 
and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that 
she was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it 
was only that she would not make up her mind to allow a 
crowned princess to be dethroned. No earthly influence 
could have held men true in such a trial. The noble lords 
— the Earl of Morton and such like — vfould have made 
their own conditions, and gone with the rest ; but the vital 
force of the Scotch nation, showing itself where it was least 
looked for, would not have it so. 



on the Scottish Character, 145 

A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch 
commons at this time is to be found in a letter of an Eno-- 

o 

lish emissary, who had been sent by Lord Burleigh to see 
how things were going there. It was not merely a new 
creed that they had got ; it was a new vital power. " You 
Avould be astonished to see how men are changed here," 
this writer said. " There is little of that submission to 
those above them which there used to be. The poor think 
and act for themselves. They are growing strong, confi- 
dent, independent. The farms are better cultivated ; the 
farmers are growing rich. The merchants at Leith are 
thriving, and, notwithstanding the pirates, they are increas- 
ing their ships and opening a brisk trade with France." 

All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen 
Mary was still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It sur- 
prised the English ; still more it surprised the politicians. 
It was the one thing which disconcerted, baflled, and finally 
ruined the schemes and the dreams of Maitland. When 
he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had 
gained every body, and, as it turned out, he had all his work 
still to do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent 
Alva would not risk invasion till Scotland at least was as- 
sured. As time passed on, the English conspiracies were 
discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his 
head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed 
up with the plots to murder Elizabeth ; and Elizabeth at 
last took courage and recognized James. Supplies of 
money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the tide 
turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the 
ascendant. The great families one by one caine round 
again ; and, as the backward movement began, the Mas- 
sacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and tremendous 
impulse. Even the avowed Catholics — the Hamiltons, the 
Grordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells — quailed be- 
fore the wail of ras^e and sorrow which at that cjreat horror 
rose over their country. The Queen's party^ dwindled away 
10 



146 The Influence of the Reformation 

to a handful of desperate politicians, who still clung to Ed- 
inburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's " peace-makers," as the 
big English cannon were called, came round, at the Re- 
gent's request, from Berwick ; David's Tower, as Knox had 
long ago foretold, " ran down over the cliff like a sandy 
brae ; " and the cause of Mary Stuart in Scotland was ex- 
tinguished forever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better 
end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Mait- 
land, the cause of all the mischief, — the cleverest man, as 
far as intellect went, in all Britain, — died (so later rumor 
said) by his own hand. A nobler version of his end is 
probably a truer one : He had been long ill, — so ill that 
when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried 
into the cellars as unable to bear the sound. The break- 
ing down of his hopes finished him. "The secretary," 
wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, " is dead of grief, 
being unable to endure the great hatred which all this peo- 
ple bears towards him." It would be well if some compe- 
tent man would write a life of Maitland, or at least edit his 
papers. They contain by far the clearest account of the 
inward movements of the time ; and he himself is one of 
the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of 
the Reformation history. 

With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it be- 
came clear to all men that the Reformation would hold its 
ground. It was the final trampling out of the fire which 
for five years had threatened both England and Scotland 
with flames and ruin. For five years, — as late certainly 
as the massacre of St. Bartholomew, — those who under- 
stood best the true state of things, felt the keenest misffiv- 
ings how the event would turn. That things ended as they 
did was due to the spirit of the Scotch commons. There 
was a moment when, if they had given way, all would have 
gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had passed 
for nothing ; they had proved to be every thing ; had 
proved — the ultimate test in human thincfs — to be the 



on the Scottish Character, 147 

power which could hit the hardest blows, and they took 
rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest 
to make its way into hall and castle ; but it kej^t the form 
which it assumed in the first hours of its danger and trial, 
and never after lost it. Had the aristocracy dealt sincerely 
with things in the earlier stages of the business, again I say 
the democratic element in the Kirk might have been soft- 
ened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled 
with by their own natural leaders. Used and abused by 
Elizabeth, despised by the worldly intelligence and power 
of the times, they triumphed after all, and, as a natural 
consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon the 
fruits of the victory. 

The question now is, what has the Kirk so established 
done for Scotland ? Has it justified its own existence ? 
Briefly, we might say, it has continued its first function as 
the guardian of Scottish freedom. But that is a vague 
phrase, and there are special accusations against the Kirk 
and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other 
things than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intru- 
sive, superstitious, a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood 
over again with a new face — these and other such epithets 
and expressions we have heard often enough applied to it 
at more than one stage of its history. Well, I suppose 
that neither the Kirk nor any thing else of man's making 
is altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which 
lay before it when it had got over its first perils. Scotch 
patriotism succeeded at last in the object it had so passion- 
ately set its heart upon. It sent a king at last of the 
Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty ; and it never 
knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between 
James Stuart and his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily 
as did his mother ; and, when he got to England, he found 
people there who told him it would be easy to destroy it, 
and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him 
in trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland 



148 The Influence of the Reformation 

would have been to destroy the life out of Scotland. 
Thrust upon them by force, it would have been no more 
endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps 
sooner, have had what the Irish call the " rale thing" back 
again. The political freedom of the country was now 
wrapped up in the Kirk ; and the Stuarts were perfectly 
well aware of that, and for that very reason began their 
crusade against it. 

And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, 
philosophical, intellectual thing which some people think it 
ought to have been, how would it have fared in that cru- 
sade ; how altogether would it have encountered those sur- 
plices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of Claver- 
house ? It is hard to lose one's life for a " perhaps ; " and 
philosophical belief at the bottom means a " perhaps," and 
nothino; more. For more than half the seventeenth cen- 
tury, the battle had to be fought out in Scotland, which in 
reality was the battle between liberty and despotism ; and 
where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they 
were maintaining God's cause against the devil, could the 
poor Scotch people have found the strength for the une- 
qual struggle which was forced upon them ? Toleration is 
a good thing in its place ; but you cannot tolerate what 
will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat. En- 
lio-htenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be 
true enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. 
In these matters the vital questions are not always those 
which appear on the surface ; and in the passion and reso- 
lution of brave and noble men there is often an inarticu- 
late intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in 
words. Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the 
spoken word either misses it or is but half the truth. On 
such subjects, and with common men, latitude of mind 
means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity 
of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad 
surface, the stream is shallow and languid ; narrow the 



on the Scottish Character. 149 

channel, and it becomes a driving force. Each may be 
well at its own time. The mill-race which drives the 
water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its 
foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the vic- 
tory, and then, and not till then, came the Da^^d Humes 
with their essays on miracles, and the Adam Smiths with 
their political economies, and steam-engines, and railroads, 
and philosopical institutions, and all the other blessed or 
unblessed fruits of liberty. 

But we may go further. Institutions exist for men, not 
men for institutions ; and the ultimate test of any system 
of politics, or body of opinions, or form of belief, is the 
effect produced on the conduct and condition of the peo- 
ple who hve and die under them. Now, I am not here to 
speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is 
no business of mine. We have to do here Vvith Scotland 
before the march of intellect ; with Scotland of the last 
two centuries ; with the three or four hundred thousand 
families, who for half a score of generations believed sim- 
ply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and 
walked in the ways of it. 

Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an > 
eminently pious people. It is part of the complaint of \ 
modern philosophers about them, that religion, or super- 
stition, or whatever they please to call it, had too much to 
do with their daily lives. So far as one can look into that 
commoniDlace round of things which historians never tell 
us about, there have rarely been seen in this world a set of 
people who have thought more about right and wrong, and 
the judgment about them of the upper jDowers. Long- 
headed, thrifty industry, — a sound hatred of waste, impru- 
dence, idleness, extravagance, — the feet planted firmly 
upon the earth, — a conscientious sense that the worldly 
virtues are, nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that with- 
out these, honesty for one thing is not possible, and that 
without honesty no other excellence, religious or moral, is 



150 The Influenee of the Reformation 

worth any thing at all, — this is the stuff of which Scotch 
life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called 
gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted 
modern writer has favored us lately with long strings of 
extracts from the sermons of Scotch divines of the last cen- 
tury, taking hard views of human short-comings and their 
probable consequences, and passing hard censures upon 
the world and its anuisements. Well, no doubt amusement 
is a very good thing ; but I should rather infer from the 
vehemence and frequency of these denunciations that the 
people had not been in the habit of denying themselves 
too immoderately ; and, after all, it is no very hard charge 
against those teachers that they thought more of duty than 
of pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic 
side of things ; and the most austere preacher, when he is 
out of the pulpit, and you meet him at the dinner-table, 
becomes singularly like other people. We may take cour- 
age, I think : we may believe safely that in those minister- 
ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable ; we 
may hope that no large body of human beings have for 
any length of time been too dangerously afraid of enjoy- 
ment. Among other good qualities, the Scots have been 
distinguished for humor — not for venomous wit, but for 
kindly, genial humor, which half loves what it laughs at — 
and this alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it 
belongs have not looked too exclusively on the gloomy side 
of the world. I should rather say that the Scots had been 
an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry, the hon- 
est doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done 
well, under penalties ; the necessaries of life moderately 
provided for ; and a sensible content with the situation 
of life in which men are born — this through the week, 
and at the end of it the " Cottar's Saturday Night " — the 
homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together, 
and irradiated with a sacred presence. Happiness ! such 
happiness as we human creatures are likely to know upon 
this world, will be found there, if anywhere. 



071 the Scottish Charade?'. 151 

The author of the " History of Civilization " makes a 
naive remark in connection with this subject. Speaking of 
the other country, which he censures equally with Scotland 
for its slavery to superstition, he says of the Spaniards 
that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious, temper- 
ate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in 
their families, full of humor, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet 
that all this " has availed them nothing " — " has availed 
them nothing," that is his expression — because they are 
loyal, because they are credulous, because they are con- 
tented, because they have not apprehended the first com- 
mandment of the new covenant : " Thou shalt aet on and 
make money, and better thy condition in life ; " because, 
therefore, they have added nothing to the scientific knowl- 
edge, the wealth, and the progress of mankind. Without 
these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail nothing. 
They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied 
science, and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an 
ever-increasing number of people to live upon the earth ; 
but the happiness of those people remains, so far as I know, 
dependent very much on the old conditions. I should 
be glad to believe that the new views of things will pro- 
duce effects upon the character in the long run half so 
beautiful. 

There is much more to say on this subject, were there 
time to say it, but I will not trespass too far upon your pa- 
tience ; and I would gladly have ended here, had not the 
mention of Spain suggested one other topic, which I should 
not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don 
Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland 
of Knox and Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials 
and witch burnings. The belief in witches was common 
to all the world. The prosecution and punishment of the 
poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when the 
Kirk was most powerful ; in England and New England, 
when Puritan principles were also dominant there. It is 



152 Tlie Influence of the Reformation 

easy to understand the reasons. Evil of all kinds was 
supposed to be the work of a personal devil ; and in the 
general horror of evil, this particular form of it, in which 
the devil was thought especially active, excited the most 
passionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent 
themselves unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. 
Knox himself is not free from reproach. A poor woman 
was burned at St. Andrews when he was living there, and 
when a v/ord from him would have saved her. It remains 
a lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable 
adjunct to knowledge, is no "substitute for it ; and when 
conscience undertakes to dictate beyond its province, the 
result is only the more monstrous. 

It is well that we should look this matter in the face ; 
and as particular stories leave more impression than gen- 
eral statements, I will mention one, perfectly well authen- 
ticated, which I take from the official report of the pro- 
ceedings : — Towards the end of 1593 there was trouble in 
the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot 
to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 
"notorious witch" called Alison Balfour. When Alison 
Balfour's life was looked into, no eyidence could be found 
connecting her either with the j^articular offense or with 
witchcraft in j^eneral ; but it was enough in these matters 
to be accused. She swore she was innocent ; but her guilt 
was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tor- 
tured again and again. Her legs were put in the caschi- 
laws, — an iron frame which was gradually heated till it 
burned into the flesh, — but no confession could be wrung 
from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something 
else had to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a 
daughter, a child seven years old. As her own sufferings 
did not work upon her, she might be touched, perhaps, by 
the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were 
brought into court, and placed at her side ; and the hus- 
band first was placed in the " lang irons " — some accursed 



on the Scottish Character. 153 

instrument; I know not what. Still the devil did not 
yield. She bore this ; a^d her son was next operated on. 
The boy's legs were set in " the boot," — the iron boot 
you may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, 
which, when forced home, crushed the very bone and mar- 
row. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the 
wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no confession 
yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There 
was a machine called the piniwinkies — a kind of thumb- 
screw, which brought blood from under the finger-nails, 
with a pain successfully terrible. These things were ap- 
plied to the poor child's hands, and the mother's constancy 
broke down, and she said she would admit any thing they 
wished. She confessed her witchcraft, — so tried, she 
would have confessed to the seven deadly sins, — and then 
she was burned, recalling her confession, and with her last 
breath protesting her innocence. 

It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that 
after this her guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means 
of extorting confession do not seem to have been tried 
again. Yet the men who inflicted these tortures would 
have borne them all themselves sooner than have done 
any act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They 
did not know that the instincts of humanity were more 
sacred than the logic of theology, and in fighting against 
the devil they were themselves doing the devil's work. 
We should not attempt to apologize for these things, still 
less to forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instill into 
mankind a more wholesome lesson — more wholesome, or 
one more hard to learn. The more conscientious men are, 
the more difficult it is for them to understand that in their 
most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the 
limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may 
be the victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and hap- 
pily, such cases were but few, and affected but lightly the 
general condition of the people. 



154 The Influence of the Reformation, etc. 

The student running over the records of other times 
finds certain salient things standing out in frightful promi- 
nence. He concludes that the substance of those times 
was made up of the matters most dwelt on by the annalist. 
He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of 
every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, 
the monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the com- 
mon and usual are passed over in silence. The philosophic 
historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we 
are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unex- 
ampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth ; but catching at 
certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our 
civilization, may call us a nation of assassins. It is to in- 
vert the pyramid and stand it on its point. The same sys- 
tem of belief which produced the tragedy which I have 
described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary 
life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and 
greatest in Scottish character. 



THE 

PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.' 



Not lon£: ago I beard a living thinker of some eminence 
say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfor- 
tune. Intellectiiany, he said, it was absurd ; and practi- 
cally, it was an offense, over which he stumbled. It would 
have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they could 
have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the 
track of the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to 
understand the conditions which have made them what 
they are, and which has created for them that very wisdom 
in which they themselves are so contented. But it is 
strange,- indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt 
such a conclusion should trouble himself any more to look 
for truth. If a mere absurdity could make its way out of 
a little fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the 
whole civilized world ; if men are so pitiably silly, that in 
an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers 
should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, 
should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of 
heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness 
there was among them ; surely there were nothing l)etter 
for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and to 
crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering him- 
self in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for man- 
kind or for their oi3inions. For what better test of truth 
1 From the Leader, 1851. 



156 The Pldlo%ofliy of CatJiolicism. 

have we than the ablest men's acceptance of it ? and if the 
ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately accepted 
what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right have we 
to hope that with the same natures,- the same passions, the 
same understandings, no better proof against deception, 
w^e, like they, are not entangled in what, at the close of 
another era, shall seem again ridiculous? The scoff of 
Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres (bread and wine) 
may be translated literally by the modern Protestant ; and 
the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the 
Pagan creed, the modern skeptic returns upon their own. 
Of what use is it to destroy an idol, when another, or the 
same in another form, takes immediate possession of the 
vacant pedestals ? 

I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of 
my friend. In the opinion even of Goethe, who was not 
troubled with credulity, the human race can never attain to 
any thing higher than Christianity, if we mean by Christi- 
anity the religion which was revealed to the world in the 
teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more 
limited rejirobation by our own Reformers of the creed of 
mediaeval Europe is not more just or philosophical. 

Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if 
he had scoffed at Ptolemy. Newton could not have been 
without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without the Chaldees ; and 
as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it with the 
science of sciences — the science of life, which has grown 
through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak 
of the errors of the past. We, with this glorious present 
which is opening on us, we shall never enter on it, we shall 
never understand it, till we have learnt to see in that past, 
not error, but installment of truth, hard-fought-for truth, 
wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The promised 
land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the 
possession of it while the bones of our fathers who labored 
through the wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a 



The PhilosopJiy of Catliolicism. 157 

pre}^ to the unclean birds. We must gather their relics 
and bury them, and sum up their labors, and inscribe the 
record of their actions on their tombs as an honorable 
epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has 
done its work, and if what is left of it is now holding us 
back from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for 
our affectionate acknowledgment ; not for our heaping con- 
tempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient exami- 
nation of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us 
farewell, and give us God-speed on our further journey. 

In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phe- 
nomena perpetually repeat themselves ; they rise in the 
highest thought extant at the time of their origin ; the con- 
clusions of philosophy settle into a creed ; art ornaments 
it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows 
through a long series of generations into the heart and 
habits of the people ; and so long as no disturbing cause 
interfer-es, or so long as the idea at the centre of it sur- 
vives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life shoots beautifully up 
out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea becomes 
obsolete ; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit 
in the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among 
the thinkers, and ideas enter into new and unexplained 
relations. The old formula will not serve, but new formulae 
are tardy in appearing ; and habit and superstition cling to 
the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it 
forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined 
action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once- 
beautiful symbolism becomes at last no better than " a 
whited sepulchre full of dead men's bones and all unclean- 
ness." So it is now. So it was in the era of the Caesars, 
out of which Christianity arose ; and Cliristianity, in the 
form which it assumed at the close of the Arian contro- 
versy, was the deliberate solution which the most powerful 
intellects of that day could offer of the questions which 
had grown with the growth of mankind, and on which 
Paganism had suffered shipwreck. 



158 The PMlosopTiy of Catholicism. 

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When 
Paganism rose, men had not begun to reflect upon theni' 
selves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The bad 
man was a bad man — the coward, a coward — the liar, a 
liar — individually hateful and despicable ; but in hating 
and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks were 
satisfied to have felt all that it was necessary to feel about 
them ; and how such a j^henomenon as a bad man came to 
exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire. There 
is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the 
gods. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous 
villainies ; there is a Tartarus where the darkest criminals 
suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and Ixion are suffer- 
ing for enormous crimes, to which the small wickedness 
of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and 
other such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, 
representing physical phenomena. But with Socrates a 
change came over philosophy ; a sign — j)erhaps a cause — 
of the decline of the existing religion. The study of man 
superseded the study of Nature : a purer Theism came in 
with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity 
at once assumed an importance, the intensity of which 
made every other question insignificant. How man could 
know the good and yet choose the evil ; how God could be 
all pure ai^ almighty, and yet evil have broken into his 
creation -^ these were the questions which thenceforth were 
the perplexity of philosophic speculation. 

Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how 
evil came to be, the leaders of all the sects agreed at last 
upon the seat of it. Whether matter was eternal, as Aris- 
totle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and 
Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the 
short-comings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluc- 
tancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. 
God would have every thing perfect, but the nature of the 
element in which He worked in some way defeated his 



The Philosophy of Catholicism, 159 

purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to every 
tiling which was created out of it ; and pain, and want, and 
hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its 
material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations 
crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and appetites of 
its companion — the fleshly lusts which waged perpetual 
war against the soul. 

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the ques- 
tion was how to conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free 
the spirit from its control. 

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread 
behind the march of Alexander ; but as his generals could 
only make their conquests permanent by largely accepting 
the eastern manners, so philosophy could only make good 
its ground by becoming itself orientalized. The one pure 
and holy God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for 
himself had existed from immemorial time in the traditions 
of the Jews ; while the Persians, who had before taught 
the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent evil 
being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account 
of the difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven 
centuries of struggle, and many hundred thousand folios, 
were the results of the remarkable fusion which followed. 
Out of these elements, united in various proportions, rose 
successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the Hellenists, the 
Therapeutae, those strange Essene communists, with the 
innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, 
the battle was limited to the two great rivals, under one or 
other of which the best of the remainder had ranged them- 
selves — Manicheism and Catholic Christianity : Maniche- 
ism in which the Persian — Catholicism in which the Jewish 
— element most preponderated. It did not end till the 
close of the fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbi- 
tration than by a decided victory which either side could 
claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge how large a 
portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the 



160 The PhilosoiyJiy of Catholicism. 

mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to 
it. Let us trace something of the real bearings of this 
section of the world's oriental history, which to so many 
moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over v/ords 
and straws. 

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of 
evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, it was so 
far a conclusion which both Jew and Persian were ready to 
accept ; the naked Aristotelic view of it being most ac- 
ceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic 
Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to 
look for a solution of the question which Plato had left 
doubtful, and to explain how evil had crept into matter. 
He could not allow that what God had created could be of 
its own nature imperfect. God made it very good ; some 
other cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as 
before he had reduced the independent Arimanes, whose 
existence he had learnt at Babylon, into a subordinate 
spirit ; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of 
death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the 
natural strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he ac- 
counted for them under the supposition that the first man 
had deliberately sinned, and by his sin had brought a curse 
upon the whole material earth, and upon all which was 
fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and 
lovely — a garden of delight, loading itself of its own free 
accord with fruit and flower, and every thing most exquisite 
and beautiful. No bird or beast of prey broke the eternal 
peace which reigned over its hospitable surface. In calm 
and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the 
lion browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, 
knowing neither decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor 
any change or infirmity, was pure as the immortal sub- 
stance of the unfallen angels. 

But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away 
and creation as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably 



The Philosophy of Catholicism. 161 

ruined. Adam sinned — no matter how : he sinned ; the 
sin was the one terrible fact ; moral evil was brought into 
the world by the only creature who was capable of com- 
mitting it. Sin entered in, and death by sin ; death and 
disease, storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. 
The imprisoned passions of the wild animals were let loose, 
and earth and air became full of carnage ; worst of all, 
man's animal nature came out in gigantic strength — the 
carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds, rapines, 
and murders ; and then the law, and with it, of course, 
breaches of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam 
was infected in the animal change which had passed over 
Adam's person, and every child, therefore, thenceforth 
naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the 
curse which he had incurred. Every material organization 
thenceforward contained in itself the elements of its own 
destruction, and the philosophic conclusions of Aristotle 
were accepted and explained by theology. Already, in 
the popular histories, those who were infected by disease 
were said to be bound by Satan ; madness was a " posses- 
sion" by the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from 
Adam till Christ, groaned and travailed under Satan's 
power. The noble nature in man still made itself felt ; 
but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might 
will to obey the higher law, but the law in the members 
was over-strong for it and bore it down. This was the 
body of death which philosophy detected but could not 
explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward 
with its magnificent promise of deliverance. 

The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protest- 
ants are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as 
fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman 
Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to modern 
thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. 
Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be 
saved ; because, from the beginning, soul and flesh were one 



162 The Philosophy of Catholicism. 

man and inseparable. Without his flesh, man was not, or 
would cease to be. But the natural organization of the 
flesh was infected with evil, and unless organization could 
begin again from a new original,, no pure material sub- 
stance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom God 
had first made the world, entered into the womb of the 
Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a 
new organic cell ; and around it, through the virtue of his 
creative energy, a material body grew again of the sub- 
stance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as the first 
body of the first man was clean when it passed out under 
his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus won- 
derfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost 
power of mankind. He came to redeem man ; and, there- 
fore. He took a human body, and He kept it pure through 
a human life, till the time came when it could be applied 
to its marvelous purpose. He died, and then appeared 
what was the nature of a material human body when freed 
from the limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, 
neither was it possible that it should see corruption. It 
was real, for the disciples were allowed to feel and handle 
it. He ate and drank with them to assure their senses. 
But space had no power over it, nor any of the material 
obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and 
his body obeyed. He was here, He was there. He was 
visible, He was invisible. He was in the midst of his dis- 
ciples and they saw Him, and then He was gone whither 
who could tell ? At last He passed away to heaven ; but 
while in heaven. He was still on earth. His body became 
the body of his Church on earth, not in metaphor, but in 
fact ! — his very material body, in which and by which the 
faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were thence- 
forth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would 
eat ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, 
a pure material substance, to leaven the old natural sub- 
stance and assimilate it to itself As they fed upon it it would 



The Philosophy of Catholicism. 163 

grow into them, and it would become their own real body. 
Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death, but the 
flesh of Christ was the life" of the world, over which death 
had no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncir- 
cunicision — but a new creature — and this new creature, 
which the child first put on in baptism, was born again into 
Christ of water and the Spirit. In the Eucharist he was 
fed and sustained, and went on from strength to strength ; 
and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to 
render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass 
away to God through the gate of the grave, and stand 
holy and perfect in the presence of Christ. Christ had 
indeed been ever present with him ; but because while life 
lasted some particles of the old Adam would necessarily 
cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth 
could not see Him. Hedged in by "his muddy vesture of 
decay," his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, 
are holden, and only in faith he feels Him. But death, 
which till Christ had died had been the last victory of evil, 
in virtue of his submission to it, became its own destroyer, 
for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old 
substance, and there was nothing needed but that these 
should be washed away, and the elect would stand out at 
once pure and holy, clothed in immortal bodies, like refined 
gold, the redeemed of God. 

The being who accomplished a work so vast — a work 
compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling 
diflSculty — what could He be but God? God Himself! 
Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power 
which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal 
and coeternal adversary? He was God. He was man 
also, for He was the second Adam — the second starting- 
point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no 
original impurity might infect the substance which He as- 
sumed ; and being Himself sinless. He showed in the 
nature of his person, after his resurrection, what the ma- 



164 The Philosophy of Catholicism. 

terial body would have been in all of us except for sin, 
and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity, 
the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. 
Here was the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on 
his pillar and sent St. Anthony to the tombs — of the 
night watches, the weary fasts, the penitential scourgings, 
the life-long austerities which have been alternately the 
glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They 
desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in 
life the work of death in uniting themselves more com- 
pletely to Christ by the destruction of the flesh, which lay 
as a veil between themselves and Him. 

Such I believe to have been the central idea of the 
beautiful creed which, for 1500 years, tuned the heart and 
formed the mind of the noblest of mankind. From this 
centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the 
full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy 
and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the 
common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the 
Throne of God, the seven mighty angels, and the seven 
stars, the seven sacraments shed over mankind a never- 
ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests, a holy 
order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, rep- 
resented Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his 
twelfth year, was presented in the Temple, and first en- 
tered on his Father's business; and the baptized child, 
when it has grown to an age to become conscious of its 
vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge 
of what it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a 
fresh gift of grace to assist it forward on its way. In ma- 
turity it seeks a companion to share its pains and pleas- 
ures ; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the union. 
Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpet- 
uate the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the 
world. He made holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it 
as the symbol to represent his own mystic union with his 



Tlie Philosophy of Catholicism. 165 

Church. Even saints cannot live without at times some spot 
adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe 
and move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. 
Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to sub- 
due his own flesh — for that which was already perfect did 
not need subduing — but to give to penance a cleansing vir- 
tue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ 
consecrates our birth ; Christ throws over us our baptismal 
robe of pure unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we 
go forward. He raises us when we fall. He feeds us with 
the substance of his own most precious body. In the per- 
son of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue of that 
which in his own person He actually performed when a 
man living on this earth. Last of all, when time is draw- 
ing to its close with us — when life is past, when the work 
is done, and the dark gate is near, beyond which the gar- 
den of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his tender 
care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting 
of death, but its appearance is still terrible ; and He will 
not leave us without special help at our last need. Fie 
tried the agony of the monient ; and He sweetens the cup 
for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the grave 
with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in 
his last anointing before his passion, and then all is over. 
We lie down and seem to decay — to decay — but not 
all. Our natural body decays, being the last remains of 
the infected matter which we Have inherited from Adam ; 
but the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has 
made our life, and is our real body as we are in Christ, that 
can never decay, but passes off into the kingdom which is 
prepared for it ; that other world where there is no sin, and 
God is all in all ! 



A PLEA 



FOE THE 

FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.^ 



In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or in- 
quiry, the judicious questioning of received opinions has 
been regarded as the sign of scientific vitaHty, the princi- 
ple of scientific advancement, the very source and root of 
healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been regu- 
lated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament ; if 
there had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every 
licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and 
penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of 
Henry the Eighth's jDhysician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to 
conjecture in what state of health the peojDle of this coun- 
try would at present be found. Constitutions have changed 
with habits of life, and the treatment of disorders has 
changed to meet the new conditions. New diseases have 
shown themselves of whicli Doctor Butts had no cog- 
nizance ; new continents have given us plants with medi- 
cinal virtues previously unknown ; new sciences, and even 
the mere increase of recorded experience, have added a 
thousand remedies to those known to the age of the Tu- 
dors. If the College of Physicians had been organized 
into a board of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment 
had been regarded as a crime against society, which a law 
had been established to punish, the hundreds who die an- 

1 Fraser's Magazine, 1863. 



Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties. 167 

nually from preventible causes would have been thousands 
and tens of thousands. 

Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The 
accuracy of the present theory of the planetary movements 
is tested daily and hourly by the most delicate experiments, 
and the Legislature, if it so pleased, might enact the first 
principles of these movements into a statute, without dan- 
ger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, 
if the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal 
procedure, in a few years gravitation itself would be 
called in question, and the whole science would wither un- 
der the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena still 
unexplained to give plausibility to skepticism; there are 
others more easily formularized for working purposes in 
the language of Hipparchus ; and there would be reaction- 
ists who would invite us to return to the safe convictions 
of our forefathers. What the world has seen the world 
may see again ; and were it once granted that astronomy 
were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would 
imprison new Galileos ; the knowledge already acquired 
would be strangled in the cords which were intended to 
keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free air on 
which its life depends, it would dwindle and die. 

A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools — a Mr. Jel- 
linger Symonds — opening, perhaps for the first time, an 
elementary book on astronomy, came on something which 
he conceived to be a difficulty in the theory of lunar mo- 
tion. His objection was on the face of it plausible. The 
true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the op- 
posite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived 
that the moon could not revolve on its axis, because the same 
side of it was continually turned towards the earth ; and 
because if it were connected with the earth by a rigid 
bar — which, as he thought, would deprive it of power of 
rotation — the relative aspects of the two bodies would re- 
main unchanged. He sent his views to the " Times." He 



168 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

appealed to the common sense of the world, and common 
sense seemed to be on his side. The men of science were 
of course right ; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious, 
had been hitherto explained in language which the general 
reader could not readily comprehend. A few words of 
elucidation cleared up the confusion. We do not recollect 
whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not ; but most of us 
who had before received what the men of science told us 
with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking 
for ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged 
a confused idea for a clear one. 

It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of au- 
thority and of the value of open inquiry. The ignorant 
man has not as good a right to his own opinion as the 
instructed man. The instructed man, however right he 
may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and 
' merely insist that they are true. The one asks a question, 
the other answers it, and all of us are the better for the 
business. 

Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened, 
when the only reply to a difficulty was an appeal to the 
Astronomer-Royal, where the rotation of the moon was 
an article of salvation decreed by the law of the land, and 
where all persons admitted to hold office under the State 
were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer- Royal — 
as it was, if we remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. 
Symonds's presumption — would have brought an action 
against him in the Court of Arches ; Mr. Symonds would 
have been deprived of his inspectorship — for, of course, 
he would have been obstinate in his heresy ; the world out- 
side would have had an antecedent presumption that truth 
lay with the man who was making sacrifices for it, and that 
there was little to be said in the way of argument for what 
could not stand without the help of the law. Every body 
could understand the difficulty ; not every body would 
have taken the trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Sy- 



of Theological Difficulties. 169 

monds would have been a Colenso. and a good many of us 
would have been convinced in our secret hearts that the 
moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room 
table. 

As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to be- 
lieve in its capacity for self-defense, so practically, in every | 
subject except one, errors are allo^ved free room to express 
themselves, and the liberty of opinion which is the life of j 
knowledge, as surely becomes the death of falsehood. A 
method — the soundness of w^hich is so evident that to 
argue in favor of it is almost absurd — might be expected 
to have been applied as a matter of course to the one sub- 
ject where mistake is supposed to be fatal, — w^here to 
come to wrong conclusions is held to be a crime for which 
the IMaker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity. 
Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long 
continued to exclude theology from the region where free 
discussion is supposed to be applicable. That so many 
persons have a personal interest in the maintenance of par- 
ticular views, would of itself be fatal to fair argument. 
Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not 
enough for them unless there is might to support it, and 
those who talk most of faith show least that they possess it. 
But there are deeper and more subtle objections. The 
theologian requires absolute certainty, and there are no ab- • 
solute certainties in science. The conclusions of science 
are never more than in a high degree probable ; they are 
no more than the best explanations of phenomena which 
are attainable in the existing state of knowledge. The 
most elementary laws are called law^s only in courtesy. 
They are generalizations which are not considered likely to 
require modification, but which no one pretends to be, in 
the nature of trie cause, exhaustively and ultimately true. 
As phenomena become more complicated, and the data for 
the interpretation of them more inadequate, the explana- 
tions offered are put forward hypothetically, and are grad- 



170 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

uated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesita- 
tion is altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty 
increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter ; his 
convictions admit of no qualification ; his truth is sure as 
the axioms of geometry ; he knows what he believes, for 
he has the evidence in his heart ; if he inquire, it is with a 
foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It 
is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opin- 
ions for each of which the same internal witness is affirmed. 
The Mayo peasant crawling with his bare knees over the 
splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick, the nun prostrate be- 
fore the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the spasmodic 
ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in 
themselves which correspond to their creed : the more pas- 
sionate, or, as some would say, the more unreasoning the 
piety, the louder and more clear is the voice within. But 
these varieties are no embarrassment to the theologian. 
He finds no fault with the method which is identical in 
them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, 
he is equally satisfied that he alone has the truth ; the rest 
are under illusions of Satan. 

Again, we hear — or we used to hear when the High 
Church party were more formidable than they are at pres- 
ent — much about " the right of private judgment." 
" Why," the eloquent Protestant would say, " should I pin 
m«y faith upon the Church ? the Church is but a congrega- 
tion of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am ; I 
have a right to my own opinion." It sounds like a paradox 
to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause 
which, above all others, would have been expected to further 
it ; but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to 
remove the grounds of theological belief beyond the i3rov- 
ince of argument. No one talks of " a right of private 
judgment" in any thing but religion ; no one but a fool 
insists on his " right to his own opinion " with his lawyer 
or his doctor. Able men who have given their time to 



of Theological Difficulties. 171 

special subjects, are authorities upon those subjects to be 
listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority at 
any given time is the collective general sense of the wisest 
men living in the department to which they belong. The 
utmost " right of private judgment " which any body claims 
in such cases, is the choice of the physician to whom he 
will trust his body, or of the counsel to whom he will com- 
mit the conduct of his cause. The expression, as it is 
commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion, 
tlie criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail 
elsewhere, and the efforts which have been made to bring 
such a notion into harmony with common sense and com- 
mon subjects have not been the least successful. The High 
Church party used to say, as a point against the Evangel- 
icals, that either "the right of private judgment" meant 
nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the 
wrong. " No," said a writer in the " Edinburgh Review," 
" it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong, 
no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man has 
no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman 
may not force a way into his house and prevent him." The 
illustration fails of its purpose. 

In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated 
a wTong use of the thing ; they meant merely that they had 
a right to their own opinions as against the Church. They 
did not indeed put forward their claim quite so nakedly ; 
they made it general, as sounding less invidious ; but no- 
body ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's 
right to be a High Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be 
a Catholic. 

But. secondly, society has a most absolute right to pre- 
vent all manner of evil, — drunkenness, and the rest of it, 
if it can, — only, in doing so, society must not use means 
which would create a greater evil than it would remedy. 
As a man can by no possibility be doing any thing but 
most foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does 



172 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

him no wrong, but rather does him the greatest benefit, if 
it can possibly keep liim sober ; and in the same way, since 
a false belief in serious matters is among the greatest of 
misfortunes, so to drive it out of a man, by the whip, if it 
cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly 
love and affection, provided the belief really and truly is 
false, and you have a better to give him in the place of it. 
The question is not what to do, but merely " how to do it ; " 
although Mr. Mill, in his love of " liberty," thinks other- 
wise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out 
his convictions in plain language, whatever they may be ; 
and so far as he means that there should be no Act of Par- 
liament to prevent him, he is perfectly just in what he says. 
But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament to public opin- 
ion, — when he lays dow^n as a general principle that the 
free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by 
society, — he would take away the sole protection which we 
possess from the inroads of any kind of folly. His dread 
of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a man better off v/ith 
a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion in- 
flicted upon him from without ; while, for our own part, we 
should be grateful for tyranny or for any thing else which 
would perform so useful an office for us. 

Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on 
particular subjects ; we believe it to be both unjust and 
unwise on the matter of which we are at present speaking ; 
but, on the whole, it is like the ventilation of a house, 
which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has to be 
taken for granted, and we cannot be forever arguing over 
our first principles. If a man persists in talking of what 
he does not understand, he is put down ; if he sports loose 
views on morals at a decent dinner party, the better sort 
of people fight shy of him, and he is not invited again ; if 
he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan, it is as- 
sumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious con- 
viction, but rather in willful levity and eccentricity which 



of Theological Difficulties. 173 

does not deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to 
make themselves bores and nuisances ; and the common 
sense of mankind mflicts wholesome inconveniences on 
those who carry their " right of private judgment " to any 
such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that 
which operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly 
is extinguished in contempt ; objections reasonably urged 
obtain a hearing and are reasonably met. New truths, 
after encountering sufficient opposition to test their value, 
make their way into general reception. 

A further cause which has operated to prevent theology 
from obtaining the benefit of free discussion is the inters 
pretation popularly placed upon the constitution of the 
Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries of its exist- 
ence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the 
immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously 
controlled its decisions, and precluded the possibility of 
error. This theory broke down at the Reformation, but it 
lefl behind it a confused sense that theological truth was 
in some way different from other truth ; and, partly on . 
grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to 
have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the 
Papacy, the State took upon itself to fix by statute the 
doctrines which should be taught to the people. The dis- 
tractions created by divided opinions were then dangerous. 
Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves the ^ 
infallibility which they denied to the Church. Every body 
was intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the 
throat of an opponent whom his arguments had failed to • 
convince. The State, while it made no pretensions to Di- 
vine guidance, was compelled to interfere in self-protection ; 
and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the 
nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was 
enacted, for the time broad and comprehensive, within 
which opinion might be allowed convenient latitude, while 
forbidden to pass beyond the border. 



17 J: A Plea for the Free Discussion 

It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, 
and formally denying to the Church its pretensions to im 
munity from error, the State could not have intended to 
bind the conscience. When this or that law is passed, the 
subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to ap- 
prove of the law as just. The Prayer-book and the Thirty- 
nine Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by act of 
Parliament, are as much laws as any other statute. They 
are a rule to conduct ; it is not easy to see why they should 
be more ; it is not easy to see why they should have been 
supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their opinions, 
X)v to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not 
forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If 
in discharge of his duty he has to pronounce a sentence 
which he declares at the same time that he thinks unjust, 
no indignant public accuses him of dishonesty, or requires 
him to resign his office. The soldier is asked no questions 
as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to fight ; 
nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quar- 
rel a bad one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous, 
if a war was unmistakably wicked, honorable men might 
feel uncertain what to do, and would seek some other pro- 
fession rather than continue instruments of evil. But 
within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service 
is generally good and honorable, we leave opinion its free 
play, and exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or 
something worse. Somehow or other, however, this whole- 
some freedom is not allowed to the clergyman. The idea 
of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of 
obedience ; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the 
Articles and accepts the Prayer-book, does not merely 
undertake to use the services in the one, and abstain from 
contradictinor to his conpTeo:ation the doctrines contained in 
the other ; but he is held to promise what no honest man, 
without presumption, can undertake to promise, — that he 
will continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks 
when he makes his engagement. 



of TIteological Difficulties. 175 

It is said that if his opinions change he may resign, and 
retire into lay communion. We are not prepared to say 
that either the Convocation of 1562, or the Parliament 
which afterwards indorsed its proceedings, knew exactly 
what they meant, or did not mean ; but it is quite clear 
that they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergy- 
man's retirement. If they had, they would have provided 
means by which he could have abandoned his orders, and 
not have remained committed for life to a profession from 
which he could not escape. If the popular theory of sub- 
scription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, 
a reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, 
pledges himself to a long series of intricate and highly diffi- 
cult propositions of abstruse divinity. He undertakes never 
to waver or doubt ; never to allow his mind to be shaken, 
whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to 
bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no 
man living has a right to promise to do. He is doing, on 
the authority of Parliament, precisely what the Church of 
Rome required him to do on the authority of a Council. 

If a clergyman, in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects 
with which he has to deal, or uiiable to reconcile some new- 
discovered truth of science with the established formulas, 
puts forward his perplexities ; if he ventures a doubt of the 
omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the sixteenth 
century, which they themselves disowned, there is an in- 
stant cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down ; 
and if no longer punished in life and limb, to have him 
deprived of the means on which life and limb can be sup- 
ported, while with ingenious tyranny he is forbidden to 
maintain himself by any other occupation. 

So far have we gone in this direction, that, when the 
" Essays and Reviews " appeared, it was gravely said — and 
said by men who had no professional antipathy to them — 
that the writers had broken their faith. Laymen were free 
to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen were 



176 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

the hired exponents of the established oi^inions, and were 
committed to them in thought and word. It was one more 
anomaly where there were enough already. To say that 
the clergy, who are set apart to study a particular subject, 
are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an inde- 
pendent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must 
take no part in the amendment of the statute-book ; that 
engineers must be silent upon mechanism ; and if an im- 
provement is wanted in the art of medicine, physicians may 
have nothing to say to it. 

These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to 
repress free inquiry, if there had been on the part of the 
really able men among us a determination to break the ice ; 
in other words, if theology had preserved the same com- 
manding interest for the more powerful minds with which 
it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one 
hand, a sense, half-serious, half-languid, of the hopeless- 
ness of the subject has produced an indisposition to meddle 
with it ; on the other, there has been a creditable reluct- 
ance to disturb by discussion the minds of the uneducated 
or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply 
an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty 
God, on the details of which they think little, and are there- 
fore unconscious of its difficulties, while in general it is the 
source of all that is best and noblest in their lives and 
actions. 

This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force 
which it once possessed it possesses no longer. The uncer- 
tainty which once affected only the more instructed extends 
now to all classes of society. A superficial crust of agree- 
ment, wearing thinner day by day, is undermined every- 
where by a vague misgiving ; and there is an unrest which 
will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to 
the core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases 
which they are pleased to call answers to objections ; they 
treat the most serious gi'ounds of perplexity as if they were 



of Theological Difficulties, 177 

puerile and trifling ; while it is notorious that for a century 
past extremely able men have either not known what to say 
about them, or have not said what they thought. On the 
Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single 
educated defender. Even in England the laity keep their 
judgment in suspense, or remain warily silent. 

" Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers ? " said a lady 
once. 

" What religion, madam ? I am of the religion of all 
sensible men." 

" And what is that ? " she asked. 

" All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves." 

If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would 
have said, perhaps, that where the opinions of those best 
able to judge are divided, the questions at issue are doubt- 
ful. Reasonable men who are unable to give them special 
attention withhold their judgment, while those who are able, 
form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty. But 
theologians will not tolerate diffidence ; they demand abso- 
lute assent, and will take nothing short of it ; and they 
affect, therefore, to drown in foolish ridicule whatever 
troubles or displeases them. The Bishop of Oxford talks 
in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of Can- 
terbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chro- 
nology. The objections of the present generation of 
'• infidels," he says, are the same which have been refuted 
again and again, and are such as a child might answer. 
The young man just entering upon the possession of his 
intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and 
more anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when 
he looks into the matter, that the archbishop has altogether 
misrepresented it ; that in fact, like other official persons, 
he had been using merely a stereotyped form of words, to 
which he attached no definite meaning. The words are 
repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be exor- 
cised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Les- 
12 



178 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

sing to Strauss and Kenan. The theologians have resolved 
no single difficulty ; they convince no one who is not con- 
vinced already ; and a Colenso, coming fresh to the subject 
with no more than a year's study, throws the Church of 
England into convulsions. 

If there were any real danger that Christianity would 
cease to be believed, it would be no more than a fulfillment 
of prophecy. The state in which the Son of Man would 
find the world at his coming he did not say would be a 
state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally to 
come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The 
creed of eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like 
an exhalation, nor are the new lights of science so ex- 
hilarating that serious persons can look with comfort to 
exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler ad- 
vocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet 
and humble men and women who in the light of it and the 
strength of it live holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives. 
The God that answers by fire is the God whom mankind 
will acknowledge ; and so long as the fruits of the Spirit 
continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those 
graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and 
invest them with that beauty of holiness which only religion 
confers, thoughtful persons will remain convinced that with 
them, in some form or other, is the secret of truth. The 
body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on falsehood ; 
and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for sci- 
ence to follow ; as we choose our food, not by the most 
careful chemical analysis, but by the experience of its 
effects upon the system ; so when a particular belief is 
fruitful in nobleness of character, we need trouble our- 
selves very little with scientific demonstrations that it is 
false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undis- 
tinguishable from substances which are perfectly innocent. 
Prussic acid, we are told, is formed of the same elements, 
combined in the same proportions, as gum-arabic. 



of Theological Difficulties, 179 

What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so 
positively, it is less easy to define. Religion from the be- 
ginning of time has expanded and changed with the growth 
of knowledge. The religion of the prophets was not the 
religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the 
Israelites of the Exodus. The gospel set aside the Law ; 
the creed of the early Church was not the creed of the 
Middle Ages, any more than the creed of Luther and 
Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas. Old 
things pass away, new things come in their place ; and 
they in their turn grow old, and give place to others ; yet 
in each of the many forms which Christianity has assumed 
in the world, holy men have lived and died, and have had 
the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from the 
truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the some- 
thing held in common by all sincere Christians, and by 
those as well who should come from the east and the 
west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the chil- 
dren of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that 
the true teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines ; 
and theology, when insisting on the reception of its huge 
catena of formulas, may be binding a yoke upon our necks 
which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear. 

But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either 
this or any other particular opinion. The writer is con- 
scious only that he is passing fast towards the dark gate 
which soon will close behind him. He believes that some 
kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things is of 
infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own 
power to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both 
ready and anxious to disclaim " all right of private judg- 
ment" in the matter. He wishes only to learn from those 
who are able to teach him. The learned prelates talk of 
the presumptuousness of human reason ; they tell us that 
doubts arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of 
the unregenerate heart. The present writer, while he be- 



180 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

lieves generally that reason, however inadequate, is the 
best faculty to which we have to trust, yet is most jDainfuUy 
conscious of the weakness of his own reason ; and once let 
the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared 
— let those who are most capable of forming a sound 
opinion, after reviewing the whole relations of science, his- 
tory, and what is now received as revelation, tell us fairly 
how much of the doctrines popularly taught they conceive 
to be adequately estabhshed, how much to be uncertain, 
and how much, if any thing, to be mistaken; there is 
scarcely, perhaps, a single serious inquirer who would not 
submit with delis^ht to a court which is the highest on 
earth. 

Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason 
is beyond its depth, that the wise and the unwise are 
on the same level of incapacity, and that we must accept 
what we find established, or we must believe nothing. 
We presume that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a 
conclusion of reason. Do what we will, reason is and 
must be our ultimate authority ; and were the collective 
sense of mankind to declare Mr. Mansell right, we should 
submit to that opinion as readily as to another. But the 
collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has 
been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and 
deliberately sawing off his seat. It seems never to have 
occurred to him that, if he is right, he has no business to 
be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says to Professor 
Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and Rid- 
ley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was un- 
reasonable ; Gardiner answered that there was the letter 
of Scripture for it, and that the human intellect was no 
measure of the power of God. Yet the Reformers some- 
how believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church 
of England seems to agree with them, that the human in- 
tellect was not so wholly incompetent. It might be a weak 
guide, but it was better than none ; and they declared on 



of Theological Difficulties. 181 

grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in heaven and 
not on earth, " it was contrary to the truth for a natural 
body to be in two pLaces at once." The common sense of 
the country was of the same opinion, and the illusion was 
at an end. 

There have been " Aids to Faith " produced lately, and 
" Rei3lies to the Seven Essayists," " Answers to Colenso," 
and much else of the kind. We regret to say that they 
have done little for us. The very life of our souls is at 
issue in the questions which have been raised, and v/e are 
fed with the professional commonplaces of the members 
of a close guild, men holding high office in the Church, or 
expecting to hold high office there ; in either case with a 
strong temporal interest in the defense of the institution 
which they represent. We desire to know what those of 
the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with 
their prospects in life ; we desire to know what the edu- 
cated laymen, the lawyers, the historians, the men of 
science, the statesmen think ; and these are for the most 
part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The 
professional theologians alone are loud and confident ; but 
they speak in the old angry tone which rarely accompanies 
deep and wise convictions. They do not meet the real 
difficulties ; they mistake them, misrepresent them, claim 
victories over adversaries with whom they have never even 
crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy 
at which we can only smile. It has been the unhappy 
manner of their class from immemorial time ; they call it 
zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond all doubt that they 
were on God's side — as if serious inquiry after truth was 
something which they were entitled to resent. They treat 
intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be con- 
demned and punished than considered and weighed, and 
rather stop their ears and run with one accord upon any 
one who disagrees with them than listen patiently to what 
he has to say. 



182 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular 
points which demand re-discussion. It is enough that the 
more exact habit of thought which science has engendered 
and the closer knowledge of the value and nature of evi- 
dence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds 
should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that 
one country and one people was governed for sixteen cen- 
turies on principles different from those which we now find 
to prevail universally. One of many questions, however, 
shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue seems 
habitually to be evaded. 

Much has been lately said and written on the authentic- 
ity of the Pentateuch and the other historical books of 
the Old Testament. The Bishop of Natal has thrown out 
in a crude form the critical results of the inquiries of the 
Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical calculations, 
for which he has a special aptitude. Fie supposes himself 
to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a 
compilation of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and 
impossibilities. The apologists have replied that the ob- 
jections are not absolutely conclusive, that the events de- 
scribed in the Book of Exodus might jDOSsibly, under cer- 
tain combinations of circumstances, have actually taken 
place ; and they then pass to the assumption that because a 
story is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. 
We have no intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His 
theological training makes his arguments very like those 
of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may settle their 
differences betvteen themselves. The question is at once 
wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that 
controversy. Were it proved beyond possibility of error 
that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, that those and 
all the books of the Old and New Testaments were really 
the work of the writers whose names they bear ; were the 
Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries ; 
and were the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions 



of Theological Difficulties, 183 

shown to have no existence except in Dr. Colenso's imag- 
ination — we should not have advanced a single step to- 
wards making good the claim put forward for the Bible, 
that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its 
parts. The "' genuineness and authenticity " argument is 
irrelevant and needless. The clearest demonstration of 
the human authorship of the Pentateuch proves nothing 
about its innnunity from errors. If there are no mistakes 
in it, it was not the workmanship of man ; and if it was 
insjDired by the Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show 
that the hand of Moses was the instrument made use of. 
To the most excellent of contemporary histories, to histo- 
ries written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they de- 
scribe, we accord but a limited confidence. The highest 
intellectual competence, the most admitted truthfulness, 
immunity from prejudice, and the absence of temptation 
to misstate the truth ; these things may secure great credi- 
bility, but they are no guaranty for minute and circum- 
stantial exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts 
and equal opportunities, never describe events in exactly 
the same way. Two witnesses in a court of law, while 
they agree in the main, invariably differ in some particu- 
lars. It appears as if men could not relate facts precisely 
as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of 
a story strike different imacinations unequally; and the 
mind, as the circumstances pass through it, alters their 
proportions unconsciously, or shifts the perspective. The 
credit which we give to the most authentic work of a man 
has no resemblance to that universal acceptance which is 
demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree : 
it is a difference in kind ; and we desire to know on what 
ground this infallibility, which we do not question, but 
which is not proved, demands our belief Very likely, the 
Bible is thus infallible. Unless it is, there can be no moral 
obligation to accept the facts which it records ; and though 
there may be intellectual error in denying them, there can 



184 A Flea for the Free Biseussion 

be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenti- 
cated ; but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness 
and authenticity of the human handiwork cannot establish 
a claim upon the conscience. It might be foolish to ques- 
tion Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no one would 
call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment 
when they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry 
Rawlinson read the name of Sennacherib on the Assyrian 
marbles, and found allusions there to the Israelites in Pal- 
estine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been 
found to the cavils of skeptics, and a convincing proof of 
the inspired truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments 
in a good cause are a sure way to bring distrust upon it. 
The Divine Oracles may be true, and may be inspired ; 
but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them 
so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the 
prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel were the work of men 
who had no knowledge of Assyria or the Assyrian Princes. 
It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage some Pu- 
nic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of 
the battle of Cannae ; but we shall not be obliged to be- 
lieve therefore in the inspiration of Livy, or rather (for 
the argument comes to that) in the inspiration of the 
whole Latin literature. 

We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infalli- 
ble ; we desire only to be told on what evidence that great 
and awful fact concerning it properly rests. It would 
seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser than argument 
— as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal 
and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which 
Christianity depends. The history of the early world is a 
history everywhere of marvels. The legendary literature of 
every nation upon earth tells the same stories of prodigies 
and wonders, of the appearances of the gods upon earth, and 
of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints of 
the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the 



of Theological Difficulties. 185 

present clay, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling 
and rivaling those of the Gospels. Some of these stories 
are romantic and imaginative ; some clear, literal, and pro- 
saic ; some rest on mere tradition ; some on the sworn 
testimony of eye-witnesses ; some are obvious fables ; some 
are as well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be 
authenticated at all. The Protestant Christian rejects 
every one of them — rejects them without inquiry — in- 
volves those for which there is good authority and those foi 
which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, 
and sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more 
likely, in the words of Hume, that men should deceive or be 
deceived, than that the laws of Nature should be violated. 
At this moment we are beset with reports of conversations 
with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of hands projected 
out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An 
unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal 
with common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, 
and notorious for business-like habits, assured this writer 
that a certain mesmerist, who was my informant's inti- 
mate friend, had raised a dead girl to .life. We should 
believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary 
matter : they would be admitted in a court of justice as 
good witnesses in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a 
man on their word. The person just now alluded to is in- 
capable of telling a willful lie ; yet our experience of the 
regularity of Nature on one side is so uniform, and our ex- 
perience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so 
large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most 
of us are contented to smile ; we do not care so much as 
to turn out of our way to examine them. 

The Bible is equally a record of miracles ; but as from 
othe-r histories we reject miracles without hesitation, so of 
those in the Bible we insist on the universal acceptance : 
the former are all false, the latter are all true. It is ev- 
ident, that in forming conclusions so sweeping as these, we 



186 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is 
called historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole^ 
the miracles of the Bible are better authenticated than the 
miracles of the saints, we should be far removed still from 
any large inference that in the one set there is no room for 
falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The writer or 
writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books 
themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings 
which are lost ; and the accounts of the great prophets of 
Israel are a counterpart, curiously like, of those of the me- 
diaeval saints. In many instances the authors of the lives 
of these saints were their companions and friends. Why do 
we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or Elisha 
took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the 
account of St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle 
fable? Why should not God give a power to the saint 
vrhich He had given to the prophet ? We can produce no 
reason from the nature of things, for we know not what 
the nature of things is ; and if down to the death of the 
Apostles the ministers of religion were allowed to prove 
their commission by working miracles, what right have we, 
on grounds either of history or philosophy, to draw a clear 
line at the death of St. John — to say that before that time 
all such stories were true, and after it all were false ? 

There is no point on which Protestant controversialists 
evade the real question more habitually than on that of mir- 
acles. They accuse those who withhold that unreserved and 
absolute belief which they require for all which they accept 
themselves, of denying that miracles are possible. They 
assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and 
proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power 
of God. Of course he is not. No sane man ever raised 
his narrow understanding into a measure of the possibilities 
of the universe ; nor does any person with any pretensions 
to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray 
is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of 



of Theological Difficulties. 187 

a sick friend, for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of 
any calamity, we expect that God will do something by an 
act of his personal will which otherwise would not have 
been done — that He will suspend the ordinary relations of 
natural cause and effect ; and this is the very idea of a mir- 
acle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no mir- 
acle may have taken place. It may be given to us by 
natural causes, and would have occurred whether we had 
prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very essence im- 
plies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which 
is above Nature. The question about miracles is simply 
one of evidence — whether in any given case the proof is 
so strong that no room is left for mistake, exaggeration, or 
illusion, while more evidence is required to establish a fact 
antecedently improbable than is sufficient for a common 
occurrence. 

It has been said recently by " A Layman," in a letter to 
Mr. Maurice, that the resurrection of pur Lord is as well 
authenticated as the death of Julius Csesar. It is far better 
authenticated, unless we are mistaken in supposing the 
Bible inspired ; or if we admit as evidence that inward as- 
SLU'ance of the Christian, which would make him rather die 
than disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman 
meant that there w^as as much proof of it, in the sense in 
which proof is understood in a court of justice, he could 
scarcely have considered what he was saying. Julius Cae- 
sar was killed in a public place, in the presence of friend 
and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. 
The circumstances were minutely known to all the world, 
and were never denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, 
on the other hand, seems purposely to have withheld such 
public proof of his resurrection as would have left no room 
for unbelief He showed Himself, " not to all the people " — 
not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have over- 
whelmed — but " to Avitnesses chosen before ; " to the circle 
of his own friends. There is no evidence which a jury 



188 A Flea for the Free Fiscussion 

could admit that He was ever actually dead. So unusual 
was it for persons crucified to die so soon, that Pilate, we 
are told, " marveled." The subsequent appearances were 
strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did 
not recognize Him till He was made known to them in the 
breaking of bread. He was visible and invisible. He was 
mistaken by those who were most intimate with Him for 
another person ; nor do the accounts agree which are given 
by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the 
modern sense (except in the one instance of St. Thomas, 
and St. Thomas was rather rebuked than praised) there 
was none, and could be none. The evidence offered was 
different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who 
satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching 
inquiry, but who gave their assent with the unhesitating 
confidence of love. 

St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance 
of the kind of testimony which then worked the strongest 
conviction. St. Paul, a fiery fanatic on a mission of per- 
secution, with the midday Syrian sun streaming down upon 
his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our 
Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the 
present day, and if a modern physician were consulted 
about it, he would say without hesitation, that it was an 
effect of an overheated brain, and that there was nothing 
in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by 
the appearance had been too strong for such an explana- 
tion to be satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, 
especially if he was a man of St. Paul's intellectual stature, 
would have at once examined into the facts otherwise 
known, connected with the subject of what he had seen. 
St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resur- 
rection — had disbelieved it fiercely and passionately ; we 
should have expected that he would at once have sought 
for those who could best have told him the details of the 
truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He 



of Ideological Difficulties. 189 

went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned 
to Jerusalem, he rather held aloof from those who had been 
our Lord's companions, and who had witnessed his ascen- 
sion. He saw Peter, he saw James ; " of the rest of the 
apostles saw he none." To him evidently the proof of the 
resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It 
was to that which he always referred when called on for a 
defense of his faith. 

Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense 
of the Avord, there may be enough to show that something 
extraordinary occurred ; but not enough, unless we assume 
tlie fact to be true on far other grounds, to produce any 
absolute and unhesitating conviction ; and inasmuch as the 
resurrection is the key-stone of Christianity, the belief in it 
must be something far different from that suspended judg- 
ment in which history alone would leave us. 

Human testimony, we repeat, under the most fiivora- 
ble circumstances imaginable, knows nothing of " absolute 
certainty ; " and if historical facts are bound up with the 
creed, and if they are to be received with the same com- 
pleteness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must 
rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the di- 
vine witness in ourselves. On human evidence, the mira- 
cles of St. Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi are as well 
established as those of the New Testament. 

M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of 
the Gospel story which, written as it is by a man of piety, 
intellect, and imagination, is spreading rapidly through the 
educated world. Carrying out the principles with which 
Protestants have swept modern history clear of miracles 
to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is miracu- 
lous from the life of our Lord, and endeavors to reproduce 
the original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died 
in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago. We have no in- 
tention of reviewing M. Penan. He will be read soon 
enough by many who would better consider their peace of 



190 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable 
to see by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of 
the narrative, he retains the rest; the imagination and the 
credulity which invent extraordinary incidents, invent or- 
dinary incidents also ; and if the divine element in the life 
is legendary, the human may be legendary also. But there 
is one lucid passage in the introduction which we commend 
to the perusal of controversial theologians : — 

" No miracle such as those of which early histories are 
full has taken place under conditions which science can 
accept. Experience shows, without exception, that mira- 
cles occur only in times and in countries in which mira- 
cles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who 
are disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been 
performed before an assemblage of spectators capable of 
testing its reality. Neither uneducated people, nor even 
men of the world, have the requisite capacity ; great pre- 
cautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific research. 
Have we not seen men of the world in our own time be- 
come the dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions ? 
And if it be certain that no contemporary miracles will 
bear investigation, is it not possible that the miracles of the 
past, were we able to examine into them in detail, would 
be found equally to contain an element of error ? It is not 
in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of 
an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles 
from history. We do not say a miracle is impossible — 
we say only that no miracle has ever yet been proved. Let 
a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow with pre- 
tensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us 
suppose him to announce that he is able to raise a dead 
man to life. What would be done ? A committee would 
be appointed, composed of physiologists, physicians, chem- 
ists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation ; a body 
would then be selected which the committee would assure 
itself was really dead ; and a place would be chosen where 



of Theological Difficulties. 191 

the experiment was to take place. Every precaution would 
be taken to leave no opening for uncertainty ; and if, under 
those conditions, the restoration to life was effected, a prob- 
ability would be arrived at which would be almost equal to 
certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit 
of being repeated. What a man has done once he should 
be able to do again ; and in miracles there can be no ques- 
tion of ease or difficulty. The performer would be re- 
quested to repeat the operation under other circumstances 
upon other bodies ; and if he succeeded on every occasion, 
two points would be established : first, that there may be in 
this world such things as supernatural operations ; and, 
secondly, that the power to perform them is delegated to, 
or belongs to, particular persons. But who does not per- 
ceive that no miracle was ever performed under such con- 
ditions as these ? " 

We have quoted this passage because it expresses with 
extreme precision and clearness the common-sense princi- 
ple which we apply to all supernatural stories of our own 
time, which Protestant theologians employ against the 
whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan is 
only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the 
history of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere 
tests of historical criticism. The Gospels themselves tell 
us why M. Kenan's conditions were never satisfied. Mira- 
cles were not displayed in the presence of skeptics to es- 
tablish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation 
sought afler a sign, the sign was not given ; nay, it is even 
said that in the presence of unbelief, our Lord was not 
able to work miracles. But science has less respect for that 
undoubting and submissive willingness to believe ; and it is 
quite certain that if we attempt to establish the truth of 
the New Testament on the principles of Paley — if with 
Professor Jowett " we interpret the Bible as any other 
book," the element of miracle which has evaporated from 
the entire surface of human history will not maintain itself 



192 A Flea for the Free Discussion 

in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the facts of Chris- 
tianity will melt in our hands like a snowball. 

Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the 
credibility of miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if 
revelation be a reality and not a dream, than that the his- 
tory containing it should be saved in its composition from 
the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the position 
in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench 
themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their 
ground : once established in these lines, they were safe and 
unassailable, unless it could be demonstrated that any fact 
or facts related in the Bible were certainly untrue. 

Nor M^ould it be necessary to say any more upon the 
subject. Those who believe Christianity would admit the 
assumption ; those who disbelieve Christianity would repu- 
diate it. The argument woukl be narrowed to that plain 
and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external 
evidence Avould cease to bring discredit upon the cause by 
their feebleness. Unfortunately — and this is the true 
secret of our present distractions — it seems certain that 
in some way or other this belief in inspiration itself re- 
quires to be revised. We are compelled to examine more 
precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the 
creation of man and the world which is given in Genesis, 
and which is made by St. Paul the basis of his theology, 
has not yet been reconciled with facts which science knows 
to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's sin, and 
unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no 
ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recogniz- 
ing, men and women lived and died upon the earth whole 
millenniums before the Eve of Sacred History listened to 
the temptation of the snake. Neither has any such deluge 
as that from which, according to the received interpreta- 
tion, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the 
human period. AVe are told that it was not God's purpose 
to anticipate the natural course of discovery : as the story 



of Theological Bifficulties, 193 

of the creation was written in human language, so the 
details of it may have been adaj^ted to the existing state 
of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not in- 
tended to teach men science, but to teach them what was 
necessary for the moral training of their souls. It may be 
that this is true. Spiiltual grace affects the moral character 
of men, but leaves their intellect unimproved. The most 
religious men are as liable as atheists to ignorance of ordi- 
nary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible when it 
touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, 
there are many things in the Bible which must become as 
uncertain as its geology or its astronomy. There is the 
long secular history of the Jewish people. Let it be once 
established that there is room for error anywhere, and we 
have no security for the accuracy of this history. The 
inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole 
belief; and it is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what 
extent it reaches, or how much and what it guarantees to 
us as true. We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in 
which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a cer- 
tainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is 
nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at 
it are in vain ; that it is given to those to whom it is given, 
and withheld from those from whom it is withheld. It may 
be that the existing belief is undergoing a silent modifica- 
tion, like those to which the dispensations of religion have 
been successively subjected ; or, again, it may be that to 
the creed as it is already established there is nothing to be 
added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this 
moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to 
see their way to a conclusion ; and notwithstanding all the 
school and church building, the extended episcopate, and 
the religious newspapers, a general doubt is coming up like 
a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the sky. 
Those who cling most tenaciously to the fiiith in which they 
were educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They 
13 



194 A Plea for the Free Discussion 

know what they believe ; but why they believe it, or why 
they should require others to believe, they cannot tell or 
cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church and 
the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the 
testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and 
the contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the 
minds of men are tossed to and fro, harassed by the 
changed attitude in which scientific investigation has placed 
?is all towards accounts of supernatural occurrences. We 
thrust the subject aside ; we take refuge in practical work ; 
we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and 
hopeless of improvement ; we refuse to let the question be 
disturbed. But we cannot escape from our shadow, and 
the spirit of uncertainty will haunt the world like an uneasy 
ghost, till we take it by the throat like men. 

We return then to the point from which we set out. The 
time is past for repression. Despotism has done its work ; 
but the day of despotism is. gone, and the only remedy is a 
full and fair investigation. Things will never right them- 
selves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace when 
there is no peace ; and the concealed imposthume is more 
dangerous than an open wound. The law in this country 
has postponed our trial, but cannot save us from it ; and 
the questions which have agitated the Continent are agitat- 
hig us at last. The student who twenty years ago was con- 
tented with the Greek and Latin Fathers and the Anglican 
Divines, now reads Ewald and Renan. The Church author- 
ities still refuse to look their difficulties in the face ; they 
prescribe for mental troubles the established doses of Paley 
and Pearson ; they refuse dangerous questions as sinful, 
and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. 
But it will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and 
fight the battle for themselves, unaided by those who ought 
to have stood by them in their trial, and could not or would 
not ; and the bitterness of those conflicts, and the end of 
most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or careless in- 



of Theological Difficulties. 195 

difference, is too notorious to all who care to know about 
such things. 

We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with 
the tentative skepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a 
healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop 
Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would 
never have been written, for the difficulties with which it 
deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. 
When questions rose in the early and middle ages of the 
Church, they were decided by councils of the wisest : those 
best able to judge met together, and compared their 
thoughts, and conclusions w^ere arrived at which indi- 
viduals could accept and act upon. At the beginning 
of the English Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was 
struggling for reception, and the old behef was merging 
in the new, the country was deliberately held in formal 
suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach 
on alternate Sundays in the. same pulpit; subjects were 
discussed freely in the ears of the people ; and at last, 
when all had been said on both sides. Convocation and 
Parliament embodied the result in formulas. Councils will 
no longer answer the purpose ; the clergy have no longer 
a superiority of intellect or cultivation ; and a conference 
of prelates from all parts of Christendom, or even from all 
departments of the English Church, would not present an 
edifying spectacle. Parliament may no longer meddle with 
opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it forged 
three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than 
sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion 
through a free press which is the best instrument for the 
discovery of truth, and the most effectual means for pre- 
serving it. 

We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air — 
that the press is free, and that all men may and do write 
w^hat they please. It is not so. Discussion is not free so 
long as the clergy who take any side but one are liable to 



196 Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties. 

be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living ; it is 
not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as 
a sin by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far 
are we from free discussion, that the world is not yet agreed 
that a free discussion is desirable ; and till it be so agreed, 
the substantial intellect of the country will not throw itself 
into the question. The battle will continue to be fought by 
outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose which they cannot 
restore ; and that collective voice of the national under- 
standing, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and 
assured conviction, will not be heard. 



CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY. 



The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The 
spirit of criticism is a questioning spirit ; the spirit of relig- 
ion is a spirit of faith, of humility, and submission. Other 
qualities may go to the formation of a religious character in 
the highest and grandest sense of the word ; but the vir- 
tues which religious teachers most generally approve, which 
make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic 
and all other churches endeavor most to cultivate in their 
children, are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devo- 
tion without reserve or qualification ; or, to use the technical 
word, " a spirit of teachableness." A religious education 
is most successful when it has formed a mind to which diffi- 
culties are welcome as an opportunity for the triumph of 
faith, which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted 
like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action 
or opinion follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate 
and unhesitating confidence. 

To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety 
which is produced by such a training, an inquiry into the 
grounds of its faith appears shocking and profane. To 
demand an explanation of ambiguities or mysteries of which 
they have been accustomed to think only upon their knees, 
is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways 
to his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human pre- 
sumption has been first gratified. 

Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of 
human knowledge, teachableness is the condition of growth. 
1 Frnser's Magazine, 1864. 



198 Criticism and the Gospel History. 

We augur ill for the future of the youth who sets his own 
judgment against that of his instructors, and refuses to 
believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet 
again, the wise instructor will not lightly discourage ques- 
tions which are prompted by an intelligent desire of knowl- 
edge. That an uninquiring submission produces characters 
of great and varied beauty ; that it has inspired the most 
splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre to 
humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is 
one of that group of qualities which commend themselves 
most to the young, the generous, and the enthusiastic, — to 
those whose native and original nobleness has suffered least 
from contact with the world, — which belong rather to the 
imao-ination than the reason, and stand related to truth 
through the emotions rather than through the sober calcu- 
lations of probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, 
to hero-worship, to that deep affection to a person or a 
cause which can see no fault in what it loves. 

" Belief," says Mr. Sewell, " is a virtue ; doubt is a sin." 
lago is nothing if not critical ; and the skeptical spirit — 
der Geist der stets veimeint — which is satisfied with noth- 
ing, which sees in every thing good the seed of evil, and 
the weak spot in every great cause or nature, has been 
made the special characteristic — we all feel with justice — 
of the devil. 

And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for 
authority, is but one element of excellence. To reverence 
is good ; but on the one condition that the object of it be 
a thing which deserves reverence ; and the necessary com- 
plement, the security that we are not bestowing our best af- 
fections where they should not be given, must be looked for 
in some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential 
for our true welfare. To prove all things — to try the spirits 
whether they be of God — is a duty laid upon us by the high- 
est authority ; and what is called progress in human things, 
religious as well as material, has been due uniformly to a 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 199 

dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in 
science, every improvement in the command of the me- 
chanical forces of Nature, every step in political or social 
freedom, has risen in the first instance from an act of skep- 
ticism, from an uncertainty whether the formulas, or the 
opinions, or the government, or the received practical theo- 
ries were absolutely perfect ; or whether beyond the circle 
of received truths there might not lie something broader, 
deeper, truer, and thus better deserving the acceptance of 
mankind. 

Submissiveness, humility, otjedience, produce if uncor- 
rected, in politics, a nation of slaves, whose baseness be- 
comes an incentive to tyranny ; in religion, they produce 
the consecration of falsehood, poperies, immaculate concep- 
tions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit of 
inquiry, if left to itself, becomes in like manner a disease 
of uncertainty, and terminates in universal skepticism. It 
seems as if in a healthy order of things, to the willingness 
to believe there should be chained as its inseparable com- 
panion a jealousy of deception ; and there is no lesson 
more important for serious persons to impress upon them- 
selves than that each of these temperaments must learn to 
tolerate the other ; faith accepting from reason the sanc- 
tion of its service, and reason receiving in return the warm 
pulsations of life. The two principles exist together in the 
highest natures ; and the man who in the best sense of the 
word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or to 
what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the 
units of which are each inadequate and incomplete, the ele- 
ments are disproportionately mixed : some men are humble 
and diffident, some are skeptical and inquiring ; yet both 
are filling a place in the great intellectual economy ; both 
contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities 
which are required to hold the balance even ; and neither 
party is entitled to say to the other, " Stand by ; I am ho- 
lier than thou." 



200 Criticism and the Gos])el History. 

And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole 
periods and cycles. For centuries together the believing 
spirit held undisputed sovereignty ; and these were what 
are called " ages of faith," ages, that is, in which the highest 
business of the intellect was to pray rather than to investi- 
gate ; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural 
cause was instinctively assumed ; when wonders were cred- 
ible in proportion to their magnitude ; and theologians, 
with easy command of belief, added miracle to miracle and 
piled dogma upon dogma. Then the tide changed ; a fresh 
era opened, which in the eyes of those who considered the 
old system the only right one, was the letting loose of the 
impersonated spirit of evil ; when profane eyes were look- 
ing their idols in the face ; when men were saying to the 
miraculous images, " You are but stone and wood," and to 
the piece of bread, " You are but dust as I am dust ; " and 
then the huge mediaeval fabric crumbled down in ruin. 

All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made 
thus liable to perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not 
petrify into habit, Init remain the reasonable conviction of 
a reasonable soul. The chanoe of times and the change 
of conditions change also the appearance of things which 
in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts 
supposed once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. 
A closer acquaintance with the phenomena of experience 
has revealed to us the action of forces before undreamt of 
working through Nature with unerring uniformity ; and to 
the mediaeval stories of magic, witchcraft, or the miracles 
of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The direct 
evidence on which such stories were received may remain 
unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. 
Even in ordinary human things where the evidence is lost, 
— as in some of our own State trials, and where we know 
only that it was such as brought conviction to judges, juries, 
and parliaments, — historians do not hesitate to call their 
verdicts into question, thinking it more likely that whole 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 201 

masses of men should have been led away by passion or 
fraud or cowardice than that this or that particular crime 
sliould have been committed. That we often go beyond 
our office and exaggerate the value of our new criteria of 
truth may be possible enough ; but it is no less certain that 
this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like 
every age which has gone before it, judges the value of 
testimony, not by itself merely, but by the degree to which 
it corresponds with our own sense of the laws of probabil- 
ity ; and we consider events probable or improbable by the 
habit of mind which is the result of our general knowledge 
and culture. To the Catholic of the Middle Ages a miracle 
was more likely than not ; and when he was told that a 
miracle had been worked, he believed it as he would have 
believed had he been told that a shower of rain had fallen, 
or that the night frost had killed the buds upon his fruit- 
trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the malice 
of Satan or the evil eye of a witch ; and if two or more 
witnesses could have been found to swear th^t they had 
heard an old woman curse. him, she would have been burnt 
for a sorceress. The man of science, on the other hand, 
knows nothing of witches and sorcerers ; when he can find 
a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the 
intervention of a cause beyond Nature ; and thus that very 
element of marvel which to the more superstitious temper- 
ament was an evidence of truth, becomes to the better 
informed a cause of suspicion. 

So it has been that throughout history, as between indi- 
viduals among ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, 
one of which has given us churches, creeds, and the knowl- 
edge of God ; the other has given us freedom and science, 
has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence, and 
reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget — that God 
is truth. Yet, essential as they are to one another, each 
keeps too absolutely to the circle of its own convictions, 
and, but half able to recognize the merit of principles 



202 Criticism and the Gospel History. 

which are alien to its own, regards the other as its natural 
enemy. 

To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the inquirer ap- 
pears as a hater of God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy 
things, soiling with rude and insolent hands what ought 
only to be humbly adored. The saint when he has the 
power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what 
he calls the honor of God, makes war upon such people 
with steel and fire. The innovator, on the other hand, 
knowing that he is not that evil creature which his rival 
represents him as being, knowing that he too desires only 
truth, first suffers ; suffers in rough times at stake and scaf- 
fold ; suffers in our own later days in good name, in repu- 
tation, in worldly fortune ; and as the whirligig of thne 
brings round his turn of triumph, takes, in French revolu- 
tions and such other fits of madness, his own period of wild 
revenge. The service of truth is made to appear as one 
thing, the service of God as another ; and in that fatal 
separation religion dishonors itself with unavailing enmity 
to what nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in 
humiliation ; and science, welcoming the character which 
its adversary flings upon it, turns away with answering hos- 
tility from doctrines without which its own highest achieve- 
ments are but pyramids of ashes. 

Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind 
move upwards through the ascending circles of progress, is 
it forever to be with them as with the globe which they 
inhabit, of which one hemisphere is perpetually dark? 
Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away ? 
Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion ? 
Is faith never to cease to dread investigation ? Is science 
chiefly to value each new discovery as a victory gained over 
its rival ? Is the spiritual world to revolve eternally upon 
an axis of which the two poles are materialism and super- 
stition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in periods 
of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is 
neither life nor warmth ? 



Criticism and the Crospel History, 203 

How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess ; 
for the present the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived 
visibly at one of those recurring times when the accounts 
are called in for audit ; when the title-deeds are to be 
looked through, and established opinions again tested. It 
is a process which has been repeated more than once in 
the world's history ; the last occasion and greatest being 
the Reformation of the sixteenth century ; and the experi- 
ence of that matter mio-ht have satisfied the most timid 
that truth has nothing: to fear ; and that relio;ion emerojes 
out of such trials stronorer and brighter than before. Yet 
Churchmen have not profited by the experience ; the pul- 
pits and the religious press ring again with the old shrieks 
of sacrilege ; the machinery of the law courts is set creak- 
ing on its rusty hinges, and denunciation and anathema in 
the old style take the place of reasoning. It will not an- 
swer ; and the worst danger to what is really true is the 
want of wisdom in its defenders. The langua2:e which we 
sometimes hear about these things seems to imply that 
while Christianity is indisputably true, it cannot stand nev- 
ertheless without bolt and shackle, as if the Author of our 
faith had left the evidence so weak that an honest investi- 
gation would fail to find it. 

Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture 
places the minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will 
compel a reconsideration of the grounds on which the ac- 
ceptance of miracles is required; If the English learned 
clergy had faith as a grain of mustard-seed, they would be 
the first to take possession of the field ; they would look 
the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we 
should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncer- 
tainty, ignorant whether, if things seem obscure to us, the 
fault is with our intellects or our hearts. 

It might have been that Providence, anticipating the 
effect produced on dead testimony by time and change, had 
raised religion into a higher sphere, and had appointed on 



204 Criticism and the Grospel History. 

earth a living and visible authority which could not err, 
guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely sustained 
in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic 
Church conceives itself to be ; but in breaking away from 
its communion, Protestant Christians have declared their 
conviction that neither the Church of Rome, nor they 
themselves, nor any other body of men on earth, are ex- 
empt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent 
for the Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact 
is true because it forms a part of their teaching, because it 
has come down to them from antiquity, and because to deny 
it is sin. Transubstantiation came down to the Fathers of 
the Reformation from antiquity ; it was received and in- 
sisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom ; yet 
nevertheless it was flung out from among us as a lie and 
an offense. The theory of the Divine authority of the 
Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism three 
centuries ago ; it was the central principle of that great 
revolt that the establishment of particular opinions was no 
guaranty for their truth ; and it becomes thus our duty as 
well as our right to examine periodically our intellectual 
defenses, to abandon positions which the alteration of time 
makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the service 
of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. 
Of all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to 
occupy is the assumption, which it is competent for Roman 
Catholics to hold, but not for them, that beliefs once sanc- 
tioned by the Church are sacred, and that to impugn them 
is not error but crime. 

With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away 
from us ; that, in this most wealthily-endowed Church of 
England, where so many of the most gifted and most ac- 
complished men among us are maintained in well-paid 
leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any 
longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer 
puts forward some few perplexities of which it would be 



Criticism and the Qospel History. 205 

well if English divinity contained a clearer solution than is 
found there. The laity, occupied in other matters, regard 
the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual interests ; but 
inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their 
souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they 
dare not close their eyes to the questions which are being 
asked in louder and even louder tones ; and they have a 
right to demand that they shall not be left to their own 
unaided efforts to answer such questions.- We go to our 
appointed teachers as to our physicians ; we say to them, 
" We feel pain here, and here, and here ; we do not see 
our way, and we require you to help us." 

Most of these perplexities are not new : they were felt 
with the first beginnings of critical investigation ; but the 
fact that they have been so many years before the world 
without being satisfactorily encountered, makes the situa- 
tion only the more serious. It is the more strange that as 
time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honor 
and office for his theological services, we should find only 
when we turn to their writings that loud promises end in 
no performance ; that the chief object which they set be- 
fore themselves is to avoid difficult ground ; and that the 
points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed 
over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual common- 
places. 

With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with 
an instinctive sense of the futility of theological controver- 
sies, the English people have long kept the enemy at bay 
by passive repugnance. To the well-conditioned English 
layman the religion in which he has been educated is part 
of the law of the land ; the truth of it is assumed in the 
first principles of his personal and social existence ; and 
attacks on the credibility of his sacred books he has re- 
garded with the same impatience and disdain with which 
he treats speculations on the rights of property or the com- 
mon maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the inspira- 



206 Criticism and the Gospel History, 

tion of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a 
century in Germany, Holland, and France ; while even in 
the desolate villages in the heart of Spain the priests find 
it necessary to placard the church walls with cautions 
against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped the trial ; 
and it is only within a very few years that the note of specu- 
lation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has 
come at last is less a matter of surprise than that it should 
have been so long delayed ; and though slow to move, it is 
likely that so serious a people will not now rest till they 
have settled the matter for themselves in some practical 
way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told, 
of vital moment, — vital to all alike, wise and foolish, edu- 
cated and uneducated, — the road to it cannot lie through 
any very profound inquiries. We refuse to believe that 
every laborer or mechanic must balance arduous historical 
probabilities and come to a just conclusion, under pain of 
damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are 
not placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse 
historical questions are open questions, and we are not. 
obliged under those penalties to hold a definite opinion 
upon them, or else there must be some general principle 
accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can 
be summarily disposed of. 

We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that 
the view of most educated English laymen at present is 
something of this kind. They are aware that many ques- 
tions may be asked, difficult or impossible to answer satis- 
factorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and 
generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament ; 
but they suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history 
can be well ascertained, the rest may and must be taken 
for granted. If it be true that of the miraculous birth, life, 
death, and resurrection of our Lord, we have the evidence 
of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the facts 
which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the 



Criticism and the Grospel Historij. 207 

direction of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can 
afford to dispense with merely curious inquiries. The sub- 
ordinate parts of a divine economy whicli culminated in so 
stupendous a mystery may well be as marvelous as itself; 
and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of 
charity, that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testa- 
ment extend their incredulity to the New ; that the point 
of their disbelief, towards which they are trenching their 
way through the weak places in the Pentateuch, is the 
Gospel narrative itself^ Whatever difficulty there may be 
in proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the 
writers whose names they bear, no one would have cared 
to challenge their genuineness who was thoroughly con- 
vinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the real 
object of these speculations lies open before us in the now 
notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through 
Europe with a rapidity which recalls the era of Luther. 
To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, 
therefore, the common sense of Englishmen has instinct- 
ively turned. If, as English commentators confidently tell 
us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we now possess it, 
is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our 
Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with him 
to be a witness of his ascension ; if St. John's Gospel was 
written by the beloved disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at 
supper ; if the other two were indeed the composition of 
the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul ; if in these 
four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's 
life and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it 
can be proved that they existed and were received as au- 
thentic in the first century of the Christian Church, a 
stronorer man than M. Renan will fail to shake the hold of 

o 

Christianity in England. 

We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to 
suggest the fact as uncertain, but being — as the matter is 

1 I do not speak of individuals ; I speak of tendency. 



20 S Criticism and the Gospel History, 

of infinite moment — being, as it were, the hinge on which 
our faith depends, we are forced beyond our office to tres- 
pass on ground which we leave usually to professional the- 
ologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties 
which it is their business to clear up, but to which, with 
worse than imprudence, they close their own eyes, and de- 
liberately endeavor to keep them from ours. Some of these 
it is the object of this paper to point out, with an earnest 
hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. EUicott, or some other com- 
petent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telHng us 
what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, 
they will find frank dealing in the long run their wisest 
policy. The conservative theologians of England have 
carried silence to the point of indiscretion. 

Looking, then, to the first three Gospels, usually called 
the Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a re- 
markable common element which runs through them all — 
a resemblance too peculiar to be the result of accident, and 
impossible to reconcile with the theory that the writers 
were independent of each other. It is not that general 
similarity which we should expect in different accounts of 
the same scenes and events, but, amidst many differences, 
a broad vein of circumstantial identity extending both to 
substance and expression. 

And the identity is of several kinds. 

I. Althouorh the three evanoelists relate each of them 
some things peculiar to themselves, and although between 
them there are some striking divergencies — as, for in- 
stance, between the account of our Lord's miraculous birth 
in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence in St. 
Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at ail — 
nevertheless, the body of the story is essentially the same. 
Out of those words and actions — so many, that if all were 
related the world itself could not contain the books that 
should be written — the three evangelists select for the 
most part the same ; the same parables, the same miracles, 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 209 

and, more or less complete, the same addresses. When 
the material from which to select was so abundant — how 
abundant we have but to turn to the fourth evangelist to 
see — it is at least singular that three writers should have 
made so nearly the same choice. 

II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related 
the same, but the language in which they are expressed is 
the same. Sometimes the resemblance is such as would 
have arisen had the evangelists been translating from a 
common document in another language. Sometimes, and 
most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity ; sen- 
tences, paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the 
very same ; a few expressions have been slightly varied, a 
particle transposed, a tense or a case altered, but the differ- 
ences being no greater than would arise if a number of 
persons were to write from memory some common passages 
which they knew almost by heart. That there should have 
been this identity in the account of the words used by our 
Lord seems at first sight no more than we should expect. 
But it extends to the narrative as well ; and with respect 
to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary 
feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken 
in the ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance be- 
tween the evangelists is in the Greek translation of them ; 
and how unlikely it is that a number of persons in trans- 
lating from one language into another should hit by acci- 
dent on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will 
show. 

Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gos- 
pels ; interpreting the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as 
any other book, what are we to conclude from phenomena 
of this kind ? What in fact do we conclude when we en- 
counter them elsewhere ? In the lives of the saints, in the 
monkish histories, there are many parallel cases. A me- 
diaeval chronicler, when he found a story well told by his 
predecessor, seldom cared to recompose it ; he transcribed 
14 



210 Criticism and tlte G-ospel History, 

the words as they stood into his own narrative, contented 
perhaps with making a few trifling- changes to add a finish 
or a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a 
third. There is the same identity in particular expressions, 
the same general resemblance, the same divergence, as 
each improves his original from his independent knowledge 
by addition or omission ; but the process is so transparent, 
that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be in- 
ferred with certainty. 

Or to take a more modern parallel, — we must entreat 
our readers to pardon any seeming irreverence which may 
appear in the comparison, — if in the letters of the corre- 
spondents of three different newspapers written from Amer- 
ica or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told 
in the same language, surrounded it might be with much 
that was unlike, but nevertheless in themselves identical, 
and related in words which, down to unusual and remarka- 
ble terms of expression, were exactly the same, what should 
we infer ? 

Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle ; if we 
were to find but a single paragraph in which two out of 
three correspondents agreed verbally, we should regard it 
as a very strange coincidence. If all three agreed verbally, 
we should feel certain it was more than accident. If through- 
out their letters there was a recurring series of such passa- 
ges, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that 
either the three correspondents had seen each other's let- 
ters, or that each had had before him some common narra- 
tive which he had incorporated in his own account. It 
might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the 
true one ; but that one or other of them was true, unless we 
suppose a miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human 
things can be certain at all. The sworn testimony of eye- 
witnesses who had seen the letters so composed would add 
nothing to the weight of a proof which without their evi- 
dence would be overwhelming ; and were the writers them- 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 211 

selves, with their closest friends and companions, to swear 
that there had been no intercommunication, and no story 
preexisting of which they had made use, and that each had 
written bond Jide from his own original observation, an 
English jury would sooner believe the whole party perjured 
than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coinci- 
dence would have occurred. 

Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evi- 
dence which of the two possible interpretations was the 
real one. If the writers were men of evident good faith ; 
jf their stories were in parts widely different ; if they made 
no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to one another 
as authorities ; finally, if neither of them, in giving a dif- 
ferent account of any matter from that given by his com- 
panions, professed either to be supplying an omission or 
correcting a mistake, then we should have little doubt that 
they had themselves not communicated with each other, 
but were supplementing, each of them from other sources 
of information, a central narrative which all alike had 
before them. 

How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical 
Gospels ? In one sense the inspiration lifts them above 
comparison, and disposes summarily of critical perplexities ; 
there is no difficulty which may not be explained by a 
miracle ; and in that aspect the points of disagreement 
between these accounts are more surprising than the sim- 
ilarities. It is on the disagreements in fact that the labors 
of commentators have chiefly been expended. Yet it is a 
question whether, on the whole, inspiration does not leave 
unaffected the ordinary human phenomena ; and it is hard 
to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary 
writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely 
cast a stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare 
into which our reason should mislead us. That is hard to 
credit ; yet that and nothing else we must believe if we 
refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of criticism 



212 Criticism and the G-ospel History. 

which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It 
may be assumed that the facts connected with them admit 
a natural explanation ; and we arrive, therefore, at the same 
conclusion as before : that either two of the evangelists 
borrowed from the third, or else that there was some other 
Gospel besides those which are now extant ; existing per- 
haps both in Hebrew and Greek, — existing certainly in 
Greek, — the fragments of which are scattered up and 
down through St. Mark, St. Matthew, and St. Luke, in 
masses sufficiently large to be distinctly recognizable. 

That at an early period in the Christian Church many 
such Gospels existed, we know certainly from the words of 
St. Luke. St. Paul alludes to words used by our Lord 
which are not mentioned by the evangelists, which he 
assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He 
speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after his resur- 
rection to five hundred brethren ; on which the four 
Gospels are also silent. It is indisputable, therefore, that 
besides and antecedent to them there were other accounts 
of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And in- 
deed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that 
from the day on which the Apostles entered upon their 
public mission, some narrative should have been drawn 
up of the facts which they were about to make known ? 
Then as little as now could the imagination of men be 
trusted to relate accurately a story composed of stupen- 
dous miracles without mistake or exaggeration ; and their 
very first step would have been to compose an account of 
what had passed, to which they could speak with certainty, 
and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is 
it not possible then that the identical passages in the Syn- 
optical Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, 
which the evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more com- 
plete histories, enlarged and expanded ? The conjecture 
has been often made, and English commentators have for 
the most part dismissed it slightingly ; not apparently being 



Criticism and the Gospel History, 218 

aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound to 
suggest anotlier ; or at least to admit that there was some- 
thing which required explanation, though this particular 
suggestion did not seem satisfactory. Yet if it were so, 
the external testimony for the truth of the Gospel history 
would be stronoer than before. It would amount to the 

o 

collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who 
had all immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's 
miracles and death and resurrection. 

But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels 
may throw some light upon the question, if indeed we can 
speak of light where all is a cloud of uncertainty. It 
would seem as if the sources of Christianity, like the roots 
of all other living things, were purposely buried in mystery. 
There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast 
moment to mankind of which so little can be authentically 
known. 

The four Gospels, in the form and under the names 
which they at present bear, become visible only with dis- 
tinctness towards the end of the second century of the 
Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the author- 
itative position which they have ever since maintained, and 
were selected by the Church out of the many other then 
existing narratives as the supreme and exclusive authorities 
for our Lord's life. Irenaeus is the first of the Fathers in 
whom they are foimd attributed by name to St. Matthew, 
St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four 
true evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor 
less than four, Irenaeus had persuaded himself because 
there were four winds or spirits, and four divisions of the 
earth, for which the Church being universal required four 
colunms ; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of 
which an evangelist corresponded ; because four covenants 
had been given to mankind — one before the Deluge in 
Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah, the third in Moses, 
the fourth and greatest in the New Testament ; while again 



214 Criticism and the Grospel History. 

the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not 
to be supposed that the intellects of those great men who 
converted the world to Christianity were satisfied with 
arguments so imaginative as these ; they must have had 
other closer and more accurate grounds for their decision ; 
but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in 
any sense, shows the enormous difference between their 
modes of reasoning and ours, and illustrates the difficulty 
of deciding at our present distance from them how far 
their conclusions were satisfactory. 

Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost 
in legend. 

The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the 
well-known words of Papias, a writer who in early life 
might have seen St. John. The works of Papias are lost 
— a misfortune the more to be regretted because Euse- 
bius speaks of him as a man of very limited understand- 
ing, iravv (TfxLKpo's tov vovv. Understanding and folly are 
words of undetermined meaning ; and when language like 
that of Irenaeus could seem profound it is quite possible that 
Papias might have possessed commonplace faculties which 
would have been supremely useful to us. A surviving 
fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the 
discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one in- 
terpreted them as he could. Pantaenus, said by Eusebius 
to have been another contemporary of the Apostles, was 
reported to have gone to India, to have found there a con- 
gregation of Christians which had been established by St. 
Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this He- 
brew Gospel. Origen repeats the story, which in his time 
had become the universal Catholic tradition, that St. Mat- 
thew's was the first Gospel, that it was written in Hebrew, 
and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish converts. 
Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was 
rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the 
Church had to say ; and what had become of that Hebrew 
original no one could tell. 



Criticism and the Gospel History, 215 

That there existed a Hebrew Gospel in very early times 
is well authenticated ; there was a gospel called the Gospel 
of the Ebionites or Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed 
a copy, and which St. Jerome thought it worth while to 
translate ; this too is lost, and Jerome's translation of it 
also ; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that it 
was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so 
it could not have failed to be recognized, although from 
such accounts of it as have been preserved, it possessed 
some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In one instance 
indeed it gave the right reading of a text which has per- 
plexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to 
suspect that that Gospel in its present form could not have 
existed before the destruction of Jerusalem. The Zacha- 
riah the son of Barachiah said by St. Matthew to have been 
slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown to Old 
Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a 
Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly 
in the manner described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the 
same words are found with this slight but important differ- 
ence, that the Zachariah in question is there called the son 
of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person 
whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chroni- 
cles. The later translator of St. Matthew had probably 
confused the names. 

Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly 
obscure. Papias, again the highest discoverable link of 
the Church tradition, says that St. Mark accompanied St. 
Peter to Rome as his interpreter ; and that while there he 
wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could re- 
member St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria 
enlarges the story. According to Clement, when St. Peter 
was preaching at Rome the Christian congregation there 
requested St. Mark to write a gospel for them ; St. Mark 
complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter, 
when informed of it, was uncertain whether to give or 



216 Criticism and the G-ospel History, 

withhold his sanction till his mind was set at rest by a 
vision. 

Irenaeus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel 
was not written till after the death of St. Peter and St. 
Paul. St. Chrysostom says that after it was written St. 
Mark went to Egypt and published it at Alexandria ; 
Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was under- 
taken at the express direction of St. Peter himself. 

Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and 
in all probability is nothing but a structure of air ; it is 
bound up with the presence of St. Peter at Rome ; and the 
only ground for supposing that St. Peter was ever at Pome 
at all is the passage at the close of St. Peter's First Epis- 
tle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the 
" Babylon " there spoken of must have been the city of the 
Caesars. This passage alone, with the wild stories (now 
known to have originated in the misreading of an inscrip- 
tion) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon Magus in the 
presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy 
arches on which the huge pretenses of the Church of 
Pome have reared themselves. If the Babylon of the 
Epistle was Babylon on the Euphrates — and there is not 
the slightest historical reason to suppose it to have been 
any thing else — the story of the origin of St. Mark's Gos- 
pel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably 
attached by Church tradition. 

Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this 
place ; it forms a subject by itself; and of that it is enough 
to say that the defects of external evidence which undoubt- 
edly exist seem overborne by the overwhelming proofs of 
authenticity contained in the Gospel itself. 

The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. 
Matthew and St. Mark were supposed to have written 
Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The apostolic and the im- 
mediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke as 
having written a history of our Lord at all. There was 



Oriticism and the Gospel History. 217 

indeed a Gospel in use among the Marcionites which re- 
sembled that of St. Luke, as the Gospel of the Ebionites 
resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the one and the 
other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth ; 
and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. 
Luke. But apparently their only reason for thinking so 
was that the two Gospels were like each other ; and for all 
that can be historically proved, the Gospel of the Marcion- 
ites may have been the older of the two. What is wanting 
externally, however, is supiDOsed to be more than made up 
by the language of St. Luke himself The Gospel was evi- 
dently composed in its present form by the same person 
who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In the latter part of 
the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the first per- 
son as the companion of St. Paul ; and the date of this 
Gospel seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early 
period in the apostolic age. There is at least a high prob- 
ability that this reasoning is sound; yet it has seemed 
strange that a convert so eminent as "the most excellent" 
Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should 
be found impossible to identify. " Most excellent " was a 
title given only to persons of high rank ; and it is singular 
that St. Paul himself should never have mentioned so con- 
siderable a name. And again there is something peculiar 
in the language of the introduction to the Gospel itself. 
Though St. Liike professes to be writing on the authority of 
eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-wit- 
nesses ; so far from it, that the word translated in the Eng- 
lish version " delivered " is literally " handed down ; " it is 
the verb which corresponds to the technical expression for 
" tradition ;" and the words translated " having had perfect 
understanding of all things from the first " might be rendered 
more properly " having traced or followed up all things from 
the beginning." And again, as it is humanly speaking cer- 
tain that in St. Luke's Gospel there are passages, however 
they are to be explained, which were embodied in it from 



218 C?iticism and the Gospel History, 

some other source ; so, though extremely probable, it is not 
absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts in which 
the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand 
as the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere 
directly introduced himself — if he had said plainly that 
he, the writer who was addressing Theophilus, had person- 
ally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his story was re- 
lating what he had seen and heard — there would be no 
room for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no 
other instance in literature of a change of person intro- 
duced abruptly without explanation. The whole book is 
less a connected history than a series of episodes and frag- 
ments of the proceedings of the Apostles ; and it is to be 
noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given 
in its place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one 
material jDoint from the second account given later in the 
part which was unquestionably the work of one of St. 
Paul's companions. There is a possibility — it amounts to 
no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the consid- 
eration of those who are better able than this writer to 
judge of it — that in the Gospel and the Acts we have 
the work of a careful editor of the second century. Towards 
the close of that century a prominent actor in the great 
movement which gave their present authority to the four 
Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch ; he it was who 
brought them together, incorporated into a single work — 
in unum opus ; and it may be, after all, that in him we 
have the long-sought person to whom St. Luke was writ- 
ing ; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled 
at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the 
different churches ; and that it formed a part of his scheme 
to supersede them by an account more exhaustive, com- 
plete, and satisfactory. 

To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if 
valid at all is absolutely fatal. We are told that although 
the names of the writers of the Gospels may not be men- 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 219 

tioned until a comparatively late period, yet that the Gos- 
pels themselves can be shown to have existed, because 
they are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the 
earliest of the Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of 
the historical thread is of little moment, and we may rest 
safely on the solid ground of so conclusive a fact. But is 
it so ? That the early Fathers quoted some accounts of 
our Lord's life is abundantly clear ; but did they quote 
these ? We proceed to examine this question — again ten- 
tatively only — we do but put forward certain considera- 
tions on which we ask for fuller information. 

If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely 
to have been acquainted with the authentic writings of the 
evangelists, that one was indisputably Justin Martyr. Born 
in Palestine in the year 89, Justin Martyr lived to the age 
of seventy-six ; he travelled over the Roman world as a 
missionary ; and intellectually he was more than on a level 
with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first 
distinctly controversial writer which the Church produced ; 
and the great facts of the Gospel history were obviously as 
well known to him as they are to ourselves. There are no 
traces in his writings of an acquaintance with any thing 
peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark ; but there are ex- 
tracts in abundance, often identical with and generally 
nearly resembling passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. 
Thus at first sight it would be difficult to doubt that with 
these two Gospels at least he was intimately familiar. And 
yet in all his citations there is this peculiarity, that Justin 
Martyr never speaks of either of the evangelists by name ; 
he quotes or seems to quote invariably from something 
which he calls aTroixvrjfxovevixaTa rdv 'Attos'toXwi/, or " Me- 
moirs of the Apostles." It is no usual habit of his to de- 
scribe his authorities vaguely ; when he quotes the Apoc- 
alypse he names St. John ; when he refers to a prophet he 
specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel. Why, unless there 
was some particular reason for it, should he use so singu- 



220 Criticism and the Gfospel History. 

lar an expression whenever he aUudes to the sacred history 
of the New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the 
evancrelists, did he never mention them even bv accident ? 
Nor is this the only singularity in Justin Martyr's quota- 
tions. There are those slight differences between them 
and the text of the Gospels which appear between the 
Gospels themselves. When we compare an extract in 
Justin with the parallel passage in St. Matthew, we find 
often that it differs from St. Matthew just as St. Matthew 
differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark — great ver- 
bal similarity — many paragraphs agreeing word for word 

— and then other paragraphs where there is an alteration 
of expression, tense, order, or arrangement. 

Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance 
between the Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has some- 
thing of his own which is not to be found in the others, so 
in these ''Memoirs of the Apostles" there are facts un- 
known to either of the evangelists. In the account ex- 
tracted by Justin from " the Memoirs " of the baptism in the 
Jordan, the words heard from heaven are not as St. Mat- 
thew gives them, — " Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I 
am well pleased," — but the words of the psalm, " Thou 
art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee ; " a reading 
which, singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of 
the Ebionites. 

Another curious addition to the same scene is in the 
words Kol TTvp avrjc^O-r) iv lopSdvy, " and a fire was kindled 
in Jordan." 

Again. Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having prom- 
ised " to clothe us with garments made ready for us if we 
keep his commandments " — /cat altoviov jSacnXeLav Trpovorjaai 

— whatever those words may precisely mean. 

These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained 
if we suppose him to have been quoting from memory. 
The evangelical text might not as yet have acquired its 
verbal sanctity ; and as a native of Palestine he might well 



Criticism and the Cfospel History. 221 

have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside 
the written word. The silence as to names, however, re- 
mains unexplained ; and as the facts actually stand there 
is the same kind of proof, and no more, that Justin Martyr 
v/as acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as there is 
that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, 
or both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commenta- 
tors decline to recognize the truth of this relation between 
the Gospels, there will be others who with as much justice 
will dispute the relation of Justin to them. He too might 
have used another Gospel, which, though like them, was 
not identical with them. 

After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared 
Tatian's " Diatessaron," a work which, as its title implies, 
v/as a harmony of four Gospels, and most likely of the 
four ; yet again not exactly as we have them. Tatian's 
harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical his- 
tories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced 
only with the public ministration. The text was in other 
places different, so much so that Theodoret accuses Tatian 
of having mutilated the Gospels ; but of this Theodoret 
had probably no better means of judging than we have. 
The " Diatessaron " has been long lost, and the name is the 
only clew to its composition. 

Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are 
such writings as remain of the immediate successors of the 
Apostles — Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and 
Ignatius : it is asserted confidently that in these there are 
quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be 
mistaken. 

We will examine them one by one. 

In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage — it is 
the only one of the kind to be found in him — agreeing 
word for word with the Synoptical Gospels : " I came not to 
call the righteous but sinners to repentance." It is one of 
the many passages in which the Greek of the three evan- 



222 Criticism and the Gospel Hktory. 

gelists is exactly the same ; it was to be found also in Jus- 
tin's " Memoirs ; " and there can be no doubt that Barna- 
bas either knew those Gospels or else the common source — 
if common source there was — from which the evangrelists 
borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not en- 
able us to say ; and till some satisfactory explanation has 
been offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the 
argument can advance no further. On the other hand, 
Barnabas like St. Paul had other sources from which he 
drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too ascribes 
words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists. 
ovTi}i cf>7](TiV 'Irjcrovs' ol OiXovri^ /xe iSetv koI onj/acrOai fxov rrji 
/?ao-tA,et'as 6(/)etA,ouo-t OXifievTis kol TrdOovres Xa^elv fxe. The 
thought is everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, 
nor any thing like them. 

Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, 
yet with them also there is the same uncertainty ; while Ig- 
natius quotes as genuine an expression which, so far as we 
know, was peculiar to a translation of the Gospel of the 
Ebionites — " Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit 
without body," on ovk ei/xt hatixovtov da w jxar ov . 

Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement 
nowhere quotes the text of the evangelists exactly as it at 
present stands ; often he approaches it extremely close ; at 
times the agreement is rather in meaning than words, as if 
he were translating from another language. But again 
Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic 
Fathers cites expressions of our Lord of which the evan- 
gelists knew nothing. 

For instance : — 

" The Lord saith, ' If ye be with me gathered into my 
bosom, and do not after my commandments, I will cast you 
off, and I will say unto you, Depart from me, I know you 
not, ye workers of iniquity.' " 

And again : — 

" The Lord said, ' Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 223 

wolves.' Peter answered and said unto him, 'Will the 
wolves then tear the sheep ? ' Jesus said unto Peter, *• The 
sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the sheep) be 
dead : and fear not ye those who kill you and can do 
nothing to you ; but fear Him who after you be dead hath 
power over soul and body to cast them into hell-fire.' " 

In these words we seem to have the lost link in a pas- 
sage which appears in a different connection in St. Matthew 
and St. Luke. It may be said, as with Justin Martyr, that 
Clement was quoting from memory in the sense rather than 
in the letter ; although even so it is difficult to suppose that 
he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet 
no hypothesis will explain the most strange words which 
follow : — 

" The Lord beino- asked when His kinsjdom should come, 
said, ' When two shall be one, and that which is without as 
that which is within, and the male with the female neither 
male nor female.' " 

It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as 
these from any which have come down to us through the 
evangelist ; but they were no inventions of Clement. The 
passage reappears later in Clement of Alexandria, who 
found it in something which he called the Gospel of the 
Egyptians. 

It will be urged that because Clement quoted other au- 
thorities beside the evangelists, it does not follow that he 
did not know and quote from them. If the citation of a 
passage which appears in almost the same words in another 
book is not to be accepted as a proof of an acquaintance 
with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to 
prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's exist- 
ence. But this is not the case. If a Father, in relating 
an event which is told variously in the Synoptical Gospels, 
had followed one of them minutely in its verbal peculiari- 
ties, it would go far to prove that he was acquainted with 
that one ; if the same thing was observed in all his quota- 



224 Criticism and the Gospel History, 

tions, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he 
agreed minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in 
a second with another, minutely in a third with another, 
there would be reason to believe, that he was acquainted 
with them all ; but when he merely relates what they also 
relate in language which approaches theirs and yet dif- 
fers from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one 
another, we do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, 
and we conclude either that the early Fathers made quota- 
tions with a looseness irreconcilable with the idea that the 
language of the Gospels possessed any verbal sacredness 
to them, or that there were in their times other narratives 
of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three 
Gospels as St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke. 

Thus the problem returns upon us ; and it might almost 
seem as if the explanation was laid purposely beyond our 
reach. We are driven back upon internal criticism ; and 
we have to ask again what account is to be given of that 
element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also 
to those other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct, 
— those verbal resemblances, too close to be the effect of 
accident, — those differences which forbid the supposition 
that the evangelists copied one another. So many are 
those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each 
evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and 
those actions only were retained which either all three or 
two at least share together, the figure of our Lord from 
His baptism to His ascension would remain with scarcely 
impaired majesty. 

One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would 
make the mystery intelligible, that immediately on the 
close of our Lord's life some original sketch of it was drawn 
up by the congregation, which gradually grew and gathered 
round it whatever his mother, his relations, or his disciples 
afterwards individually might contribute. This primary 
history would thus not be the work of any one mind or 



Criticism and the Grospel History/. 225 

man ; it would be the joint work of the Church, and thus 
might well be called " Memoirs of the Apostles ; " and 
would naturally be quoted without the name of either one 
of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity, 
spread over the world, and separate churches were founded 
by particular apostles, copies would be multiplied, and 
copies of those copies; and, unchecked by the presence 
(before the invention of printing impossible) of any author- 
itative text, changes would creep in, — passages would be 
left out which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that 
sect ; others would be added as this or that apostle recol- 
lected something which our Lord had said that bore on 
questions raised in the development of the creed. Two 
great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish 
and the Gentile Churches ; there would be a Hebrew Gos- 
pel and a Greek Gospel, and the Hebrew would be trans- 
lated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's Gospel was. 
Eventually the confusion would become intolerable ; and 
among the conflictinor stories the Church would have been 
called on to make its formal choice. 

This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that 
at the time when he was writing many different narratives 
did actually exist. The hypothesis of a common origin for 
them has as yet found little favor with English theologians ; 
yet rather perhaps because it would be inconvenient for 
certain peculiar forms of English thought than because it 
has -not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gos- 
pels should have been a natural growth rather than the 
special and independent work of three separate writers, 
would be unfavorable to a divinity which has built itself up 
upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with 
doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of his- 
toric truth. Yet the text theory suffers equally from the 
mode in which the first Fathers treated the Gospels, if it 
were these Gospels indeed which they used. They at least 
could have attributed no importance to words and phrases ; 
15 



226 Criticism and the Gospel History. 

while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the 
cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favor of 
such broad and deep reception, would, however wanting 
in some details, be an evidence- of the truth of the main 
facts of the Gospel history very much stronger than that 
of three books composed we know not when, and the origin 
of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to 
regard as independent, and the writers of which in any 
other view of them must be assumed to have borrowed 
from each other. 

But the object of this article is not to press either this 
or any other theory ; it is but to ask from those who are 
able to give it, an answer to the most serious of questions. 
The truth of the Gospel history is now more widely doubted 
in Europe than at any time since the conversion of Con- 
stantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up 
a Christian and desires to remain a Christian, yet who 
knows any thing of what is passing in the world, is looking 
to be told on what evidence the New Testament claims to 
be received. The state of opinion proves of itself that the 
arguments hitherto offered • produce no conviction. Every 
other miraculous history is discredited as legend, however 
exalted the authority on which it seems to be rested. We 
crave to have good reason shown us for maintaining still 
the one great exception. Hard worked in other profes- 
sions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to learn 
how complicated is the. problem, the laity can but turn to 
those for assistance who are set apart and maintained as 
their theological trustees. We can but hope and pray that 
some one may be found to give us an edition of the Gos- 
pels in which the difficulties will neither be slurred over 
with convenient neglect or noticed with affected indiffer- 
ence. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric ; it may 
or may not win the favor of the religious world ; but it will 
earn at least the respectful gratitude of those who cannot 
trifle with holy things, and who believe that true religion is 
the service of truth. 



Criticism and the Gospel History. 227 

The last words were scarcely written when an advertise- 
ment appeared, the importance of which can scarcely be 
over-estimated. A commentary is announced on the Old 
and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to what 
are called the " misrepresentations " of modern criticism. 
It is to be brought out under the direction of the heads of 
the Church, and is the nearest approach to an official act 
in these great matters which they have ventured for two 
hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate the result. 
The word " misrepresentations " is unfortunate ; we should 
have augured better for the work if instead of it had been 
written " the sincere perplexities of honest minds." But 
the execution may be better than the promise. If these 
perplexities are encountered honorably and successfully, 
the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect 
of the country ; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken 
the command will have steered the vessel direct upon the 
rocks. 



THE BOOK OF JOB.' 



It will be matter some day of curious inquiry to ascer- 
tain why, notwithstanding the high reverence with which 
the English people regard the Bible, they have done so 
little in comparison with their continental contemporaries 
towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The 
books named below ^ form but a section of a long list which 
has appeared during the last few years in Germany on the 
Book of Job alone ; and this book has not received any 
larger share of attention than the others, either of the Old 
or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature or the 
origin of these books (and on this point there is much 
difference of opinion among the Germans as among our- 
selves), they are all agreed, orthodox and unorthodox, that 
at least we should endeavor to understand them ; and that 
no efforts can be too great, either of research or criticism, 
to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning. 

We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and 
indignantly, to so obvious a truism ; but our own efforts 
in the same direction will not bear us out. Able men in 
England employ themselves in matters of a more practical 

1 Westminster Reviero, 1853. 

2 1, Die poetischen Backer des Alien Bundes. Erklart von Heinrich 
Ewald. Gbttingen : bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836. 

2. Kurzfjefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament. Zweite 
Lieferung. Hioh. Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von 
Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852. 

3. Qucestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen. Von D. Hermannus 
Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853. 



The Book of Job. 229 

character ; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what 
has been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we pro- 
duce on the interpretation of Scripture acquire more than 
a partial or an ephemeral reputation. The most important 
contribution to our knowledge on this subject which has 
been made in these recent years is the translation of the 
" Library of the Fathers," by which it is about as rational 
to suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times can 
be superseded, as that the place of Herman and Dindorf 
could be supplied by an edition of the old scholiasts. 

It is, indeed, reasonable that, as long as we are persuaded 
that our English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the 
right one, we should shrink from contact with investiga- 
tions which, however ingenious in themselves, are based on 
what we know to be a false foundation. But there are 
some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass exam- 
ination at Exeter Hall ; and there are many subjects — 
suclv for instance, as the present — on which all their able 
men are agreed in conclusions that cannot rationally give 
offense to any one. With the Book of Job, analytical crit- 
icism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which 
have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered 
to be, beyond all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, com- 
pleted by its writer almost in the form in which it now 
remains to us. The questions on the authenticity of the 
Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought impor- 
tant, have given way before a more sound conception of the 
dramatic unity of the entire poem ; and the volumes before 
us contain merely an inquiry into its meaning, bringing, at 
the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship and 
historical and mythological research to bear upon the ob- 
scurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all 
the Hebrew compositions, — many words occurring in it, 
and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. 
How difficult our translators found it may. be seen by the 
number of words which they were obliged to insert in 



230 The Book of Job. 

italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have sug- 
gested in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we 
will notice in this place ; it will be familiar to every one as 
the passage quoted at the opening of the English Burial 
Service, and adduced as one of the doctrinal proofs of the 
resurrection of the body : " I know that my Redeemer liv- 
eth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the 
earth ; and though, after my skin worms destroy this hody, 
yet in my flesh I shall see God." So this passage stands 
in the ordinary version. But the words in italics have 
nothing answering to them in the original, — they were all 
added by the translators ^ to fill out their interpretation ; 
and for in my flesh, they tell us themselves in the margin 
that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must 
read) " out of or " without " my flesh. It is but to write 
out the verses, omitting the conjectural additions, and mak- 
ing that one small but vital correction, to see how frail a 
support is there for so large a conclusion : " I know that 
my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the latter 
upon the earth ; and after my skin destroy this ; 

yet without my flesh I shall see God." If there is any 
doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely 
not of the body, but of the spirit. And now let us- only 
add, that the word translated Redeemer is the technical 
expression for the " avenger of blood ; " and that the sec- 
ond paragraph ought to be rendered, " and one to come 
after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my inju- 
ries belongs) shall stand upon my dust," and we shall see 
how much was to be done towards the mere exegesis of the 
text. This is an extreme instance, and no one will ques- 
tion the general beauty and majesty of our translation ; but 
there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered 
over the poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were 
positively no means of understanding ; and perhaps, too, 
there were mental tendencies in the translators themselves 

1 Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed. 



The Book of Joh, 231 

which prevented them from adequately apprehending even 
the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the 
story was too stringent to allow such tendencies any lati- 
tude ; but they appear, from time to time, sufficiently to 
produce serious confusion. With these recent assistances, 
therefore, we propose to say something of the nature of this 
extraordinary book, — a book of which it is to say little to 
call it unequaled of its kind, and which will one day, per- 
haps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen 
towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the 
world. How it found its way into the canon, smiting as it 
does through and through the most deeply seated Jewish 
prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now ; to be ex- 
plained only by a traditional acceptance among the sacred 
books, dating back from the old times of the national great- 
ness, when the minds of the people were hewn in a larger 
type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the 
great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its his- 
tory, are alike a mystery to us ; it existed at the time when 
the canon was composed ; and this is all that we know 
beyond what we can gather out of the language and con- 
tents of the poem itself 

Before going further, however, we must make room for a 
few remarks of a very general kind. Let it have been 
written when it would, it marks a period in which the re- 
ligious convictions of thinking men were passing through a 
vast crisis ; and we shall not understand it without having 
before us clearly something of the conditions which periods 
of such a kind always and necessarily exhibit. 

The history of religious speculation appears in extreme 
outline to have been of the following character. We may 
conceive mankind to have been originally launched into 
the universe with no knowledge either of themselves or of 
the scene in which they were placed ; with no actual knowl- 
edge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a 
faculty of gaining knowledge ; and first unconsciously, and 



232 The Book of Joh, 

afterwards consciously and laboriously, to have commenced 
that long series of experience and observation which has 
accumulated in thousands of years to what we now see 
around us. Limited on all sides' by conditions which they 
must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and find- 
ing everywhere forces working, over which they had no 
control, the fear which they would naturally entertain of 
these invisible and mighty agents assumed, under the direc- 
tion of an idea which we may perhaps call inborn and 
inherent in human nature, a more generous character of 
reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they 
discovered them, they regarded as the decrees, or as the 
immediate energies of personal beings ; and as knowledge 
grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as knowl- 
edge of Nature, but of God, or the gods. All early pagan- 
ism appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of 
a consecration of the first rudiments of physical or specu- 
lative science. The twelve labors of Hercules are the la- 
bors of the sun, of which Hercules is an old name, through 
the twelve signs. Chronos, or time, being measured by the 
apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child ; 
Time, the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is 
again itself, in the high faith of a human soul conscious of 
its power and its endurance, supposed to be baffled and de- 
throned by Zeus, or life ; and so on through all the elabo- 
rate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are no more 
than real insight into real phenomena, allegorized as time 
went on, elaborated by fancy, or idealized by imagination, 
but never losing their original character. 

Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self- 
developing, and, as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant ; a new 
god was welcomed to the Pantheon as a new scientific dis- 
covery is welcomed by the Royal Society ; and the various 
nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities, 
— a new god either representing a new power not hitherto 
discovered, or one with which they were already familiar 



The Booh of Job. 233 

under a new name. With such a power of adaptation and 
enlargement, if there had been nothing more in it than this, 
such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to 
the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of 
human character. Already in its later forms, as the unity 
of Nature was more clearly observed, and the identity of 
Nature throughout the known world, the separate powers 
were subordinating themselves to a single supreme king ; 
and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental 
forces, the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and 
discovering the law under the person. Happily or unhap- 
pily, however, what they could do for themselves they could 
not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite had been 
made too human to be allegorized. Humanized, and yet, 
we may say, only half-humanized, retaining their purely 
physical nature, and without any proper moral attribute at 
all, these gods and goddesses remained, to the many, exam- 
ples of sensuality made beautiful ; and, as soon as right 
and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to 
worship any more these idealized despisers of it. The hu- 
man caprices and passions which served at first to deepen 
the illusion, justly revenged themselves ; paganism became 
a lie, and perished. 

In the mean time, the Jews (and perhaps some other na- 
tions, but the Jews chiefly and principally) had been mov- 
ing forward along a road wholly different. Breaking early 
away from the gods of Nature, they advanced along the line 
of their moral consciousness ; and leaving the nations to 
study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves 
to man and to human life. Their theology grew up round 
the knowledge of good and evil, and God, with them, was 
the supreme Lord of the world, who stood towards man in 
the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a faith, 
to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility ; 
the laws of Nature might be many, but the law of conduct 
was one ; there was one law and one king ; and the condi- 



234 The Booh of Job, 

tions under which He governed the world, as embodied in 
the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as 
iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the 
will of an unalterable Being. So far there was little in 
common between this process and the other ; but it was 
identical with it in this one important feature, that moral 
knowledge, like physical, admitted of degrees ; and the 
successive steps of it were only purchasable by experience. 
The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern 
theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature 
of good and evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able 
to comprehend it. Thus, no system of law or articles of 
belief were or could be complete and exhaustive for all 
time. Experience accumulates ; new facts are observed, 
new forces display themselves, and all such formulae must 
necessarily be from period to period broken up and moulded 
afresh. And yet the steps already gained are a treasure so 
sacred, so liable are they at all times to be attacked by 
those lower and baser elements in our nature which it is 
their business to hold in check, that the better part of man- 
kind have at all times practically regarded their creed as a 
sacred total to which nothing may be added, and from 
which nothing may be taken away ; the suggestion of a 
new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an 
insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined 
forces of all common practical understandings, which know 
too well the value of what they have, to risk the venture 
upon untried change. Periods of religious transition, there- 
fore, when the advance has been a real one, always have been 
violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They 
to whom the precious gift of fresh light has been given are 
called upon to exhibit their credentials as teachers in suf- 
fering for it. They, and those who oppose them, have alike 
a sacred cause ; and the fearful spectacle arises of earnest, 
vehement men contending against each other as for their 
own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and mar- 



The Book of Job. 235 

tyrdoms, and religious wars ; and, at last, tlie old faith, like 
the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out 
of the ashes. 

Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of relig- 
ions, natural and moral; the first, indeed, being in no 
proper sense a religion at all, as we understand religion ; 
and only assuming the character of it in the minds of great 
men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their time 
and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, 
with an effort and with indifferent success, endeavored to 
express, under the systems which they found, emotions 
which had no proper place in them. 

Of the transition j^eriods which we have described as 
taking place under the religion which we call moral, the 
first known to us is marked at its opening by the appear- 
ance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision of the 
new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it. 

The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected 
with the moral government of the world is the general one, 
that on the whole, as things are constituted, good men 
prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are miserable. 
The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very 
near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, 
they are forced to obey certain laws under which alone so- 
ciety is possible, and these laws, even in their rudest form, 
approach the laws of conscience. To a certain extent, 
every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations ; 
and those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. 
If society were perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry 
itself out till the two sets of laws were identical ; but per- 
fection so far has been only in Utopia, and, as fir as we can 
judge by experience hitherto, they have approximated most 
nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of life. 
Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern 
distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All 
gross sins were offenses against society, as it then was con- 



j^66 The Book of Job, 

stituted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as 
being so ; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the 
acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without 
open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible un- 
der the complications of more artificial polities ; and the 
oppression or injury of man by man was open, violent, ob- 
vious, and therefore easily understood. Doubtless, there- 
fore, in such a state of things it would, on the whole, be 
true to experience that, judging merely by outward pros- 
perity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded 
and punished as such in this actual world ; so far, that is, 
as the administration of such rewards and punishments was 
left in the power of mankind. But theology could not con- 
tent itself with general tendencies. Theological proposi- 
tions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute, 
universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every 
phenomenon. Superficial generalizations were construed 
into immutable decrees ; the God of this world was just 
and righteous, and temporal prosperity or wretchedness 
were dealt out by him immediately by his own will to his 
subjects, according to their behavior. Thus the same dis- 
position towards completeness which was the ruin of pagan- 
ism, here, too, was found generating the same evils; the 
half truth rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only 
the consequences of ill actions which followed through 
themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of Nature 
— earthquakes, storms, and pestilences — were the min- 
isters of God's justice, and struck sinners only with dis- 
criminating accuracy. That the sun should shine alike on 
the evil and the good was a creed too high for the early 
divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were no 
greater offenders than their neighbors. The conceptions 
of such men could not pass beyond the outward temporal 
consequence ; and if God's hand was not there it was no- 
where. We might have expected that such a theory of 
things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions 



The Book of Job. 237 

of experience ; but the same experience shows also what a 
marvelous power is in us of thrusting aside phenomena 
which interfere with our cherished convictions ; and when 
such convictions are consecrated into a creed which it is a 
sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water drop- 
ping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but 
only in thousands of years. This theory was and is the 
central idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness 
of which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Chris- 
tians from the first dawn of its existence ; it lingers among 
ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in 
spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we 
call ourselves, is still the instant interpreter for us of any 
unusual calamity, — a potato blight, a famine, or an epi- 
demic : such vitality is there in a moral faith, though now, 
at any rate, contradicted by the experience of all mankind, 
and at issue even with Christianity itself. 

At what period in the world's history misgivings about 
it began to show themselves it is now impossible to say ; it 
was at the close, probably, of the patriarchal period, when 
men who really tliougU must have found the ground pal- 
pably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings 
are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing un- 
der the name of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there 
breathes a spirit of deepest and saddest skepticism. But 
Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and forces himself back 
into his old position ; and the skepticism of Ecclesiastes is 
confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after 
enjoyment ; searching after pleasures, - pleasures of sense 
and pleasures of intellect, — and who, at last, bears re- 
luctant testimony that, by such methods, no pleasures can 
be found which will endure ; that he had squandered the 
power which might have been used for better things, and 
had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a 
warning to mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like 
the miso-ivings of a noble nature. The writer's own per- 



238 • The Book of Job. 

sonal happiness had been all for which he had cared ; he 
had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to 
fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the dis- 
appointment with which his own spirit had been clouded. 

Utterly different from these, both in character and in the 
lesson which it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown 
date, as we said, and unknown authorship, the language 
impregnated with strange idioms and strange allusions, 
un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it 
hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, 
but not of it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by 
its own internal majesty, yet exerting no influence over the 
minds of the people, never alluded to, and scarcely ever 
quoted, till at last the light which it had heralded rose up 
full over the world in Christianity. 

The conjectures which have been formed upon the date 
of this book are so various, that they show of themselves 
on how slight a foundation the best of them must rest. 
The language is no guide, for although unquestionably of 
Hebrew oiigin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the 
other books in the Bible ; while of its external history 
nothing is known at all, except that it was received into the 
canon at the time of the great synagogue. Ewald decides, 
with some confidence, that it belongs to the great prophetic 
period, and that the writer was a contemporary of Jere- 
miah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters, and this 
opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly re- 
ceived among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, 
however (and the reasons which he brings forward are 
really no more than conjectures), these opposite considera- 
tions may be of moment. It is only natural that at first 
thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature 
to the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it 
belongs was generally at its best ; but, on reflection, the 
time when the poetry of prophecy is the richest, is not 
likely to be favorable to compositions of another kind. 



The Booh of Job. 239 

The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude, dissolution, 
sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round 
them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were 
with the ancient spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, 
and to promise. Finding themselves too late to save, and 
only, like Cassandra, despised and disregarded, their voices 
rise up singing the swan song of a dying people, now fall- 
ing away in the wild wailing of despondency over the 
shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumph- 
ant hope that God will not leave them forever, and in his 
own time will take his chosen to Himself again. But such 
a period is an ill occasion for searching into the broad 
problems of human destiny ; the present is all-important 
and all-absorbing ; and such a book as that of Job could 
have arisen only out of an isolation of mind, and life, and 
interest, which we cannot conceive of as possible under 
such conditions. 

The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces 
itself upon us that, let the writer have lived when he would, 
in his struggle with the central falsehood of his own peo- 
ple's creed, he must have divorced himself from them out- 
wardly as well as inwardly ; that he travelled away into 
the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in 
exile. Every thing about the book speaks of a person who 
had broken free from the narrow littleness of " the pecul- 
iar people." The language, as we said, is full of strange 
words. The hero of the poem is of a strange land and par- 
entage — a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the 
manners, the customs, are of all varieties and places : 
Egypt, with its river and its pyramids, is there ; the de- 
scription of mining points to Phoenicia ; the settled life in 
cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat 
of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to 
Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. 
No mention, or hint of mention, is there throughout the 
poem of Jewish traditions or Jewish certainties. We look 



240 The Booh of Joh. 

to find the three friends vindicate themselves, as they so 
well might have done, by appeals to the fertile annals of 
Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the plagues 
of Egypt, or the thunders of Sin^ii. But of all this there 
is not a word ; they are passed by as if they had no exist- 
ence ; and instead of them, when witnesses are required 
for the power of God, we have strange un-Hebrew stories 
of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of the 
giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, " the 
sweet influences of the seven stars," and the glittering frag- 
ments of the sea-snake Rahab ^ trailing across the northern 
sky. Again, God is not the God of Israel, but the father 
of mankind ; we hear nothing of a chosen people, nothing 
of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar privileges ; and 
in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince of 
this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judg- 
ment, the accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and 
fro over the earth, and carry up to heaven an account of 
the sins of mankind. We cannot believe that thoughts of 
this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah. 
In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some 
avy]p TToXvTpoTTo^ who, like the old hero of Ithaca, 

TToAAwf auOpcincou i'Sez/ ^crrea Koi v6ov i'yuca, 
TToXXa 5' oy iu T:6vT(f irddeu 6,\yea %v Kara. dvfji,6v, 
appifx^vos ^vxh^ • 

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all con- 
trived as if to baffle curiosity — as if, in the very form of 
the poem, to teach us that it is no story of a single thing 
which happened once, but that it belongs to humanity itself, 
and is the drama of the trial of man, with Almighty God 
and the angels as the spectators of it. 

No reader can have failed to have been struck with the 

simplicity of the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, 

it tells us every thing which is necessary to be known in 

the fewest possible words. The history of Job was proba- 

1 See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14. 



The Book of Job. 241 

bly ^ tradition in the East ; his name, like that of Priam in 
Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfor- 
tunes the problem of philosophers. In keeping with the 
current belief, he is described as a model of excellence, the 
most perfect and upright man upon the earth, '• and the 
same was the greatest man in all the east." So far, great- 
ness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the 
popular theory required. The details of his character are 
brought out in the progress of the poem. He was '' the 
father of the oppressed, and of those who had none to 
help them." When he sat as a judge in the market-places, 
" righteousness clothed him " there, and "his justice was a 
robe and a diadem." He " broke the jaws of the wicked, 
and plucked the spoil out of his teeth ; " and, humble in 
the midst of his power, he " did not despise the cause of 
his man-servant, or his maid-servant, when they contended 
with him," knowing (and amidst those old people where 
the, multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves 
of the powerful, to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into 
concubines at their master's pleasure, it was no easy mat- 
ter to know it) — knowing that " He who had made him 
had made them," and one " had fashioned them both in the 
womb." Above all, he was the friend of the poor ; " the 
blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon him," 
and he " made the widow's heart to sing for joy." 

Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side 
of his unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chap- 
ter, we have a picture of the best man who could then be 
conceived ; not a hard ascetic, living in haughty or cow- 
ardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and blood, a man 
full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room 
might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God 
Himself bears the emphatic testimony, that " there was 
none like him upon the earth, a perfect and upright man, 
who feared God and eschewed evil." If such a person as 
this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the 
16 



242 The Booh of Job. 

current belief of the Jews was false to the root ; and tra- 
dition furnished the fact that he had been visited by every 
worst calamity. How was it then to be accounted for? 
Out of a thousand possible explanations, the poet intro- 
duces a single one. He admits us behind the veil which 
covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing 
angel charging Job with an interested piety, and of being 
obedient because it was his policy. " Job does not serve 
God for nought," he says ; " strip him of his splendor, and 
see if he will care for God then. Humble him into pov- 
erty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his 
heart." The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to 
the belief which, with its " rewards and punishments," 
immediately fostered selfishness ; and the poem opens with 
a double action, on one side to try the question whether it 
is possible for man to love God disinterestedly — the issue 
of which trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we 
watch the progress of it with an anxious and fearful inter- 
est ; on the other side, to bring out, in contrast to the 
truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of the 
popular faith — to show how, instead of leading men to 
mercy and affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their 
sympathies, and enhances the trials of the sufferer, by re- 
finements which even Satan had not anticipated. The 
combination of evils, as blow falls on blow, suddenly, 
swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed 
visitation (as indeed it was) ; if ever outward incidents 
might with justice be interpreted as the immediate action 
of Providence, those which fell on Job might be so inter- 
preted. The world turns disdainfully from the fallen in 
the world's way ; but far worse than this, his chosen friends, 
wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, 
without one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see 
in them a judgment upon his secret sins. He becomes to 
them an illustration, and even (such are the paralogisms 
of men of this description) a proof of their theory that 



The Booh of Job, 243 

" the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while ; " and 
instead of the comfort and help which they might have 
brought him, and which in the end they were made to 
bring him, he is to them no more than a text for the enun- 
ciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the 
sufferer himself had been educated in the same creed ; he, 
too, had been taught to see the hand of God in the out- 
ward dispensation ; and feeling from the bottom of his 
heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction of 
what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very 
faith in God shaken from its foundation. The worst evils 
which Satan had devised were distanced far by those which 
had been created by human folly. 

The creed in which Job had believed was tried and 
found wanting, and, as it ever will be when the facts of ex- 
perience come in contact with the inadequate formula, the 
true is found so mingled with the false, that they can 
hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept 
away together. 

A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even 
while it is arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful 
whether the writer purposely intended it. He probably 
cared only to tell the real truth ; to say for the old theory 
the best which could be said, and to produce as its defend- 
ers the best and wisest men whom in his experience he 
had known to believe and defend it. At any rate, he rep- 
resents the three friends, not as a weaker person would 
have represented them, as foolish, obstinate bigots, but as 
wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset, at 
least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak 
what they have to say with the most earnest conviction 
that it is true. Job is vehement, desperate, reckless. His 
language is the wild, natural outpouring of suffering. The 
friends, true to the eternal nature of man, are grave, sol- 
emn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and mis- 
taken only in supposing that it is the whole ; speaking, as 



244 The Book of Job. 

all such persons would speak, and still do speak, in defend- 
ing what they consider sacred truth against the assaults of 
folly and skepticism. How beautiful is their first introduc- 
tion : — 

" Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil 
which was come upon him, they came every one from his own 
place ; Elii3haz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and 
Zophar the Naamathite : for they had made an appointment 
together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. 
And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him 
not, they lifted up their voice and wept, and they rent 
every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads 
towards heaven. So they sat down with him upon the 
ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a 
word unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great." 

What a picture is there ! What majestic tenderness ! 
His wife had scoffed at his faith, bidding him " leave God 
and die." " His acquaintance had turned from him." He 
" had called his servant, and he had given him no an- 
swer." Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, 
had gathered round and mocked him as he lay among 
the ashes. But " his friends sprinkle dust towards heaven, 
and sit silently by him, and weep for him seven days and 
seven nights upon the ground." That is, they were true- 
hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men ; and yet 
they, with their religion, were to become the instruments 
of the most poignant sufferings, the sharpest temptations, 
which he had to endure. So it was, and is, and will be — 
of such materials is this human life of ours composed. 

And now, remembering the double action of the dra- 
ma — the actual trial of Job, the result of which is un- 
certain ; and the delusion of these men, which is, at the 
outset, certain — let us go rapidly through the dialogue. 
Satan's share in the temptation had already been over- 
come. Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had 
been sent upon him, his wife, in Satan's own words, had 



The Booh of Job. 245 

tempted Job to say, " Farewell to God," — think no more 
of God or goodness, since this was all which came of it ; 
and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the fool- 
ish women. He " had received good at the hand of the 
Lord, and should he not receive evil?" But now. when 
real love and real affection appear, his heart melts in 
him ; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a 
passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the 
agony of his sufferings, hope of better things had died 
away. He does not complain of injustice ; as yet, and 
before his friends have stung and wounded him, he makes 
no questioning of Providence, — but why was life given to 
him at all, if only for this ? Sick in mind, and sick in 
body, but one wish remains to him, that death will come 
quickly and end all. It is a cry from the very depths 
of a single and simple heart. But for such simplicity 
and singleness his friends could not give him credit ; 
possessed beforehand with their idea, they see .in his 
misery only a fatal witness against him ; such calamities 
could not have befallen a man, the justice of God would 
not have permitted it, unless they had been deserved. Job 
had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion 
was but impenitence and rebellion. 

Being as certain that they were right in this opinion 
as they were that God Himself existed, that they should 
speak what they felt was only natural and necessary ; and 
their language at the outset is all which would be dic- 
tated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the 
oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, 
suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feel- 
ings of the sufferer, to the extreme to which his love will 
allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect, — the rule 
of the world, the order of Providence. He does not ac- 
cuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him 
to gather for himself the occasion which had produced 
them ; and then passes off, as if further to soften the 



246 TJie Booh of Job. 

blow, to the mysterious vision in which the infirmity of 
mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal 
weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had 
shared in it, and the excuse for him, if he would confess 
and humble himself: the blessed virtue of repentance fol- 
lows, and the promise that all shall be well. 

This is the note on which each of the friends strikes 
successively, in the first of the three divisions into which 
the dialogue divides itself, but each with increasing per- 
emptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far from accepting 
their inter^Dretation of what had befallen him, hurls it from 
him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Cal- 
vinists should consider this), he will hear as little of the 
charges against mankind as of the charges against him- 
self. He will not listen to the " corruption of humanity," 
because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he 
knows that it is not corrupt : he knows that he is himself 
just and good, and we know it, the Divine sentence upon 
him having been already passed. He will not acknowl- 
edge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he 
could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what 
they would say. He knew all that as well as they : it was 
the old story which he had learned, and could repeat, if 
necessary, as well as any one ; and if it had been no 
more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no 
more nearly than it touched his friends, he might have 
allowed for the tenacity of opinion in such matters, and 
listened to it and replied to it with equanimity. But, as 
the proverb says, " It is ill talking between a full man 
and a fasting : " and in Job such equanimity would have 
been but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as 
the others' theories. Possessed with the certainty that he 
had not deserved what had befallen him, harassed with 
doubt, and worn out with pain and unkindness, he had 
assumed (and how natural that he should assume it) that 
those who loved him should not have been hasty to be- 



The Book of Job. 247 

lieve evil of him; he had spoken to them as he really 
felt, and he thought that he might have looked to them 
for something warmer and more sympathizing than such 
dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon 
him of what was passing in them, he attributes it (and 
now he is unjust to them) to a falsehood of heart, and not 
to a blindness of understanding. Their sermons, so kindly 
intended, roll past him as a dismal- mockery. They had 
been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at 
his passionate cry for death. " Do ye reprove words ? " 
he says, " and the speeches of one that is desperate, which 
are as wind ? " It was but poor friendship and narrow 
wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for comfort, 
and lovQ. He had longed for it as the parched caravans 
in the desert for the water-streams, and "his brethren 
had dealt deceitfully with him." The brooks, in ihe cool 
winter, roll in a full turbid torrent ; " what time it waxes 
warm they vanish, when it is hot they are consumed out of 
their place ; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the 
companies of Sheba waited for them ; they were confounded 
because they had hoped ; they came thither, and there was 
nothing.'' If for once these poor men could have trusted 
their hearts, if for once they could have believed that there 
might be " more things in heaven and earth " than were 
dreamt of in their philosophy — but this is the one thing 
which they could not do, which the theologian proper 
never has done or will do. And thus whatever of calm- 
ness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might have 
conquered for himself, is all scattered away ; and as the 
strong gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his 
heart, he pours himself out in wild fitful music, so beauti- 
ful because so true, not answering them or their speeches, 
but now flinging them from him ^ in scorn, now appealing 
to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God ; now pray- 
ing for death ; now in perplexity doubting whether, in 
some mystic way which he cannot understand, he may not, 



248 The Book of Job. 

perhaps, after all, really have sinned, and praying to be 
shown his fault ; and then staggering further into the 
darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the 
Power which has become so dreadful an enigma to 
him. "■ Thou inquirest after my iniquity, thou searchest 
after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. 
Why didst thou bring me forth out of the womb ? Oh, 
that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me. 
Cease, let me alone. It is but a little while that I have to 
live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a little before 
I go, whence I shall not return, to the land of darkness and 
the shadow of death." In what other poem in the world is 
there pathos deep as this ? With experience so stern as 
his, it was not for Job to be calm, and self-possessed, and 
delicate in his words. He speaks not what he knows, but 
what he feels ; and without fear the vv^riter allows him to 
throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch 
caring how nice ears might be offended, but contented to 
be true to the real emotion of a genuine human heart. So 
the poem runs on to the end of the first answer to Zophar. 
But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes for- 
ward, the relative position of the speakers begins to change. 
Hitherto, Job only had been passionate ; and his friends 
temperate and collected. Now, becoming shocked at his 
obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of their homilies, 
they stray still further from the truth in an endeavor to 
strengthen their position, and, as a natural consequence, 
visibly grow angry. To them. Job's vehement and desper- 
ate speeches are damning evidence of the truth of their 
suspicion. Impiety is added to his first sin, and they begin 
to see in him a rebel against God. At first they had been 
contented to speak generally, and much which they had 
urged was partially true ; now they step forward to a direct 
application, and formally and personally accuse himself 
Here their ground is positively false ; and with delicate art 
it is they who are now growing violent, and "bounded self- 



The Booh of Job. 249 

love begins to show behind their zeal for God ; while in 
contrast to them, as there is less and less truth in what they 
say, Job grows more and more collected. For a time it had 
seemed doubtful how he would endure his trial. The light 
of his faith was burning feebly and unsteadily ; a little 
more, and it seemed as if it might have utterly gone out. 
But at last the storm was lulling ; as the charges are 
brought personally home to him, the confidence in his own 
real innocence rises against them. He had before known 
that he was innocent ; now he feels the strength which lies 
in innocence, as if God were beginning to reveal Himself 
within him, to prepare the way for the after outward man- 
ifestation of Himself 

The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little 
difference ; the sameness being of course intentional, as 
showing that they were not speaking for themselves, but as 
representatives of a prevailing opinion. Eliphaz, again, 
gives the note which the others follow. Hear this Calvin- 
ist of the old world : " Thy own mouth condemneth thee, 
and thine own lips testify against thee. What is man that 
he should be clean, and he that is born of a woman that he 
should be righteous ? Behold, he putteth no trust in his 
saints ; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight ; how 
much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh 
iniquity like water." Strange, that after all these thousands 
of years we should still persist in this degrading confession, 
as a thing which it is impious to deny and impious to 
attempt to render otherwise, when Scripture itself, in lan- 
guage so emphatic, declares that it is a lie. Job is innocent, 
perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness to it. It is 
Job who is found at last to have spoken truth, and the 
friends to have sinned in denying it. And he holds fast by 
his innocency, and with a generous confidence thrusts away 
the misgivings which had begun to cling to him. Among 
his complainings, he had exclaimed, that God was remem- 
bering upon him the sins of his youth — not denying them ; 



250 The Booh of Job. 

knowing well that he, like others, had gone astray before 
he had learnt to control himself, but feeling that at least in 
an earthly father it is unjust to visit the faults of childhood 
on the matured man ; feeling that he had long, long shaken 
them off from him, and they did not even impair the prob- 
ity of his after-life. But now these doubts, too, pass 
away in the brave certainty that God is not less just than 
man. As the denouncings grow louder and darker, he ap- 
peals from his narrow judges to the Supreme Tribunal — 
calls on God to hear him and to try his cause — and then, 
in the strength of this appeal the mist rises from before his 
eyes. His sickness is mortal ; he has no hope in life, and 
death is near; but the intense feeling that justice must and 
will be done, holds to him closer and closer. God may 
appear on earth for him ; or if that be too bold a hope, 
and death finds him as he is — what is death then? God 
will clear his memory in the place where he lived; his 
injuries will be righted over his grave ; while for himself, 
like a sudden gleam of sunlight between clouds, a clear, 
bright hope beams up, that he too, then, in another life, 
if not in this, when his skin is wasted off his bones, and 
the worms have done their work on the prison of his spirit, 
he too, at last, may then see God ; may see Him, and have 
his pleadings heard. 

With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he turns 
back to the world again to. look at it. Facts against which 
he had before closed his eyes he allows and confronts, and 
he sees that his own little experience is but the reflection 
of a law. You tell me, he seems to say, that the good are 
rewarded, and that the wicked are punished ; that God is 
just, and that this is always so. Perhaps it is, or will be, 
but not in the way which you imagine. You have known 
me, you have known what my life has been ; you see what 
I am, and it is no difficulty to you. You prefer believing 
that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a pre- 
tender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your 



The Book of Job. 251 

hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and you 
are angry with me because I will not lie against my own 
soul, and acknowledge sins which I have not committed. 
You appeal to the course of the world in proof of your 
faith, and challenge me to answer you. Well, then, I 
accept your challenge. The world is not what you say. 
You have told me what you have seen of it ; I will tell you 
what I have seen. 

" Even while I remember' I am afraid, and trembling 
taketh hold upon my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked 
become old, yea, and are mighty in power ? Their seed is 
established in their sight with them, and their offspring 
before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither 
is the rod of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and 
faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf 
They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their 
children dance. They take the timbrel and harp, and 
rejoice at the sound of the organ. They spend their days 
in wealth, and in a moment go down into the grave. 
Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us, fol* we de- 
sire not the knowledge of thy ways. What is the Almighty 
that we should serve him ? and what profit should we have 
if we pray to him ? " 

Will you quote the weary proverb ? Will you say that 
" God layeth up his iniquity for his children ?" (Our trans- 
lators have wholly lost the sense of this passage, and en- 
deavor to make Job acknowledge what he is steadfastly 
denying.) Well, and what then ? What will he care ? 
'•' Will his own eye see his own fall ? Will he drink the 
wrath of the Almighty? What are the fortunes of his 
house to him if the number of his own months is fulfilled ? '* 
One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and 
another is miserable. In the great indifference of nature 
they share alike in the common lot. " They lie down alike 
in the dust, and the worms cover them." 

Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was 



252 TJie Book of Job. 

hurried away by his feelings to say all this ; and that in his 
calmer moments he must have felt that it was untrue. It 
is a point on which we must decline accepting even Ewald's 
high authority. Even then, in those old times, it was be- 
ginning to be terribly true. Even then the current theory 
was obliged to bend to large exceptions ; and what Job saw 
as exceptions we see round us everywhere. It was true 
then, it is infinitely more true now, that what is called 
virtue in the common sense 'of the word, still more that 
nobleness, godliness, or heroism of character in any form 
whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's 
prosperity, or even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man 
is no doubt wretched enough ; but the worldly, prudent 
self-restraining man, with his five senses, which he under- 
stands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a 
conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called 
respectability, — such a man feels no wretchedness ; no 
inward uneasiness disturbs him, no desires which he cannot 
gratify ; and this though he be the basest and most con- 
temptible slave of his own selfishness. Providence will 
not interfere to punish him. Let him obey the laws under 
which prosperity is obtainable, and he will obtain it, let him 
never fear. He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature 
is indifferent ; the famine and the earthquake, and the 
blight or the accident, will not discriminate to strike him. 
He may insure himself against casualties in these days of 
ours, with the money perhaps which a better man would 
have given away, and he will have his reward. He need 
not doubt it. 

And, again, it is not true, as optimists would per- 
suade us, that such prosperity brings no real pleasure. A 
man with no high aspirations, who thrives, and makes 
money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy as 
such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction be the 
most blessed state for a man (and this certainly is the 
practical notion of happiness), he is the happiest of men. 



The Book of Job. 253 

Nor are those idle phrases any truer, that the good man's 
goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine ; that virtue is its 
own reward, &c., &c. If men truly virtuous care to be re- 
warded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of theii 
moral capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap 
of his, the mark of the world's scorn, and the butt for the 
spiritual archery of the theologian, alone in his forlorn na- 
kedness, like some old dreary stump which the lightning has 
scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain ? If hap- 
piness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to 
seek for, those hitherto thought the noblest among us were 
the pitifulest and wretchedest. Surely it was no error in 
Job. It was that real insight which once was given to all 
the world in Christianity, however we have forgotten it now. 
Job was learning to see that it was not in the possession of 
enjoyment, no, nor of happiness itself, that the difference 
lies between the good and the bad. True, it might be that 
God sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness — 
gives it in what Aristotle calls an iTviyiyvo^evov reXos, but it 
is no part of the terms on which He admits us to his ser- 
vice, still less is it the end which we may propose to our- 
selves on entering his serdce. Happiness He gives to 
whom He will, or leaves to the angel of Nature to distrib- 
ute among those who fulfill the laws ujDon which it depends. 
But to serve God and to love Him is higher and better 
than happiness, though it be with wounded feet, and bleed- 
ing bro^vs, and hearts loaded with sorrow. 

Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his tempta- 
tions under his feet, and finding in them a ladder on which 
his spirit rises. Thus he is passing further and even fur- 
ther from his friends, soaring where their imasjinations 
cannot follow him. To them he is a blasphemer whom 
they gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him 
with sinning on the strength of their hypothesis, and he 
has answered with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now 
all mastery over themselves, they pour out a torrent of 



254 The Book of Job. 

mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which 
in the cahner outset they would have blushed to think of. 
They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to con- 
vert conjecture into certainty, and specify in detail the par- 
ticular crimes which he must have committed. He ought 
to have committed them, and so he had ; the old argument 
then as now. " Is not thy wickedness great ? " says Eliphaz. 
"Thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, 
and stripped the naked of their clothing ; thou hast not 
given water to the weary, and thou hast withholden bread 
from the hungry ; " and so on through a series of mere 
distracted lies. But the time was past when words like 
these could make Job angry. Bildad follows them up with 
an attempt to frighten him by a picture of the power of 
that God whom he was blaspheming ; but Job cuts short 
his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of loftiness 
which Bildad could not have approached ; and then proud- 
ly and calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and 
irony, but in high, tranquil self-possession. " God forbid 
that I should justify you," he says ; " till I die I will not 
remove my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold 
fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach 
me so long as I live." 

So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing 
confidence, having insisted on their own position, and de- 
nounced their adversaries. A difficulty now arises which, 
at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the chapters 
are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh is 
assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to 
the twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all 
which he has maintained before — is, in fact, a concession 
of having been wrong from the beginning. Ewald, who, 
as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of 
Job's last and highest position, supposes that he is here 
receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate 
passion had betrayed him into denying. For many rea- 



Tlie Book of Job. 255 

sons, principally because we are satisfied that Job said 
then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald 
right ; and the concessions are too large and too inconsist- 
ent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of 
the poem. Another solution of the difficulty is very sim- 
ple, although it is to be admitted that it rather cuts the 
knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have each spoken 
a third time ; the symmetry of the general form requires 
that now Zophar should speak ; and the suggestion, we be- 
lieve, was first made by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, 
and that the verses in question belong to him. Any one 
who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily how 
such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in 
Shakespeare, the speeches in the early editions are in many 
instances wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong per- 
sons. It might have arisen from inadvertence ; it might 
have arisen from the foolishness of some Jewish transcriber, 
who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book into harmony 
with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy. This view 
has the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity. Another, 
however, has been suggested by Eichorn, who originally 
followed Kennicott, but discovered, as he supposed, a less 
violent hypothesis, which was equally satisfactory. Eich- 
orn imagines the verses to be a summary by Job of his 
adversaries' opinions, as if he said, — " Listen now ; you 
know what the facts are as well as I, and yet you main- 
tain this ; " and then passed on with his indirect reply 
to it. It is possible that Eichorn may be right — at any 
rate, either he is right, or else Dr. Kennicott is. Certainly 
Ewald is not. Taken as an account of Job's own convic- 
tion, the passage contradicts the burden of the whole poem. 
Passing it by, therefore, and going to what immediately 
follows, we arrive at what, in a human sense, is the final 
climax — Job's ^^ctory and triumph. He had appealed to 
God, and God had not appeared ; he had doubted and 
fought against his doubts, and at last had crushed them 



256 The Booh of JoK 

down. He, too, had been taught to look for God in out- 
ward judgments ; and when his own experience had shown 
him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had been 
leaning on a bruised reed, and it had run into his hand 
and pierced him. But as soon as in the speeches of his 
friends he saw it all laid down in its weakness and its false 
conclusions — when he saw the defenders of it wandering 
further and further from what he knew to be true, growing 
every moment, as if from a consciousness of the unsound- 
ness of their standing ground, more violent, obstinate, and 
unreasonable, the scales fell more and more from his eyes 
— he had seen the fact that the wicked might prosper, and 
in learning to depend upon his innocency he had felt that 
the good man's support was there, if it was anywhere : and 
at last, with all his heart, was reconciled to the truth. The 
mystery of the outer world becomes deeper to him, but he 
does not any more try to understand it. The wisdom 
which can compass that mystery, he knows, is not in man, 
though man search for it deeper and harder than the 
miner searches for the hidden treasures of the earth ; the 
wisdom which alone is attainable is resignation to God. 

" Where," he cries, " shall wisdom be found, and where 
is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the 
price thereof, neither is it found in the land of the living. 
The depth said it is not with me ; and the sea said it is not 
in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close 
from the fowls of the air.^ God understandeth the way 
thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, 
understands the mysteries of the world which He has 
made]. And unto man He said. Behold ! the fear of the 
Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil, that is 
understanding." 

Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over. There 

1 An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the in- 
habitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between heaven 
and earth. 



The Booh of Joh. 257 

is no clearer or purer faith possible for man ; and Job had 
achieved it. His evil had turned to good ; and sorrow had 
severed for him the last links which bound him to lower 
things. He had felt that he could do without happiness, that 
it was no longer essential, and that he could live on, and still 
love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as 
of preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, 
full of all human tenderness and susceptibility. His old 
life was still beautiful to him. He does not hate it because 
he can renounce it ; and now that the struggle is over, the 
battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed over in 
that magnificent song of victory, the note once more 
changes : he tiu"ns back to earth to linger over those old 
departed days, with which the present is so hard a con- 
trast ; and his parable dies away in a strain of plaintive, 
but resigned melancholy. Once more he throws himself 
on God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in 
pleading humility.^ And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald 
says, it could not have come before) the answer out of the 
whirlwind. Job had called on God, and prayed that He 

1 The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and God's 
appearance, is now decisivel}' pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be 
genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the in- 
troduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the Prologue 
or the Epilogue ; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to the progress 
of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false hypothesis of the three 
friends, and betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job's 
sufferings. And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally 
suggest, are now made certainties by a fuller knowledge of the language, 
and the detection of a different hand. The interpolator has unconsciously 
confessed the feeling which allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, 
too, possessed Avith the old Jew theory, was unable to accept in its full- 
ness so great a contradiction to it; and, missing the spirit of the poem, he 
believed that God's honor could still be vindicated in the old way. " His 
wrath was kindled " against the friends, because they could not answer 
Job ; and against Job, because he would not be answered ; and conceiving 
himself " full of matter," and " ready to burst like new bottles," he could 
not contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the Theodice, 
such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he 
lived. 

17 



258 The Booh of Job. 

might appear, that he might plead his cause with Him ; and 
now He comes, and what will Job do ? He comes not as the 
healing spirit in the heart of man ; but, as Job had at first 
demanded, the outward God, the Almighty Creator of the 
universe, and clad in the terrors and the glory of it. Job, 
in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with Him on 
his government. The poet, in gleaming lines, describes 
for an answer the universe as it then was known, the maj- 
esty and awfulness of it ; and then asks whether it is this 
which he requires to have explained to him, or which he 
believes himself cajDable of conducting. The revelation 
acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern 
Faust ; but when he sinks, crushed, it is not as the rebel- 
lious upstart, struck down .in his pride, — for he had him- 
self, partially at least, subdued his own presumption, — but 
as a humble penitent, struggling to overcome his weakness. 
He abhors himself for his murmurs, and " repents in dust 
and ashes." It will have occurred to every one that the 
secret which has been revealed to the reader is not, after 
all, revealed to Job or to his friends, and for this plain rea- 
son : the burden of the drama is, not that we do, but that 
we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of the govern- 
ment of the world, — that it is not for man to seek it, or 
for God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this one 
instance, admitted behind the scenes, — for once, in this 
single case, — because it was necessary to meet the received 
theory by a positive fact which contradicted it. But the 
explanation of one case need not be the explanation of 
another ; our business is to do what we know to be right, 
and ask no questions. The veil which in the Egyptian 
legend lay before the face of Isis is not to be raised ; and 
we are not to seek to penetrate secrets which are not ours. 
Wliile, however, God does not condescend to justify his 
ways to man. He gives judgment on the past controversy. 
The self-constituted pleaders for him, the acceptors of his 
person, were all wrong ; and Job, — the passionate, vehe- 



The Book of Job. 259 

ment, scornful, misbelieving Job, — he had spoken the 
truth ; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been de- 
fending a transient theory as an everlasting truth. 

'• And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these 
words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My 
wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends ; 
for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my 
servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven bul- 
locks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job ; and offer 
for yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job shall 
pray for you, and him will I accept. Lest I deal with you 
after your folly, for that ye have not spoken of me the thing 
which is right, like my servant Job." 

One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do the 
cause of Job's misfortunes, and that as soon as his trial was 
over it was no longer operative, our sense of fitness could 
not be satisfied unless he were indemnified outwardly for 
his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated, and Job's integ- 
rity proved ; and there is no reason why the general law 
should be interfered with, which, however large the excep- 
tions, tends to connect goodness and prosperity ; or why 
obvious calamities, obviously undeserved, should remain 
any more unremoved. Perhaps, too, a deeper lesson still 
lies below his restoration — something perhaps of this kind. 
Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever 
be the name by which we designate that state in which life 
is to our own selves pleasant and delightful, as long as they 
are sought or prized as things essential, so far have a tend- 
ency to disennoble our nature, and are a sign that we are 
still in servitude to selfishness. Only when they lie out- 
side us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as 
God pleases, — only then may such things be possessed 
with impunity. Job's heart in early times had clung to 
them more than he knew, but now he was purged clean, 
and they were restored because he had ceased to need 
them. 



260 The Book of Joh. 

Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the mate- 
rial of which it is woven we have not here been concerned, 
although it is so rich and pregnant that we might with lit- 
tle difficulty construct out of it a- complete picture of the 
world as then it was : its life, knowledge, arts, habits, super- 
stitions, hopes, and fears. The subject is the problem of 
all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a 
range. But what we are here most interested upon is the 
epoch which it marks in the progress of mankind, as the 
first recorded struggle of a new experience with an estab- 
lished orthodox belief. True, for hundreds of years, per- 
haps for a thousand, the superstition against which it was 
directed continued. When Christ came it was still in its 
vitality. Nay, as we saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock 
life, among us at this very day. But even those who re- 
tained then- imperfect belief had received into their canon 
a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so irre- 
sistible was the majesty of truth. 

In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, 
it is worth while to ask ourselves what advances we have 
made further in the same direction ? and once more, at the 
risk of some repetition, let us look at the position in which 
this book leaves us. It had been assumed that man, if he 
lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be 
happy. Happiness, "his being's end and aim," was his 
legitimate and covenanted reward. If God therefore was 
just, such a man would be happy ; and inasmuch as God 
was just, the man who was not hajDpy had not deserved to 
be. There is no flaw in this argument ; and if it is un- 
sound, the fallacy can only lie in the supposed right to 
happiness. It is idle to talk of inward consolations. Job 
felt them, but they were not every thing. They did not re- 
lieve the anguish of his wounds ; they did not make the 
loss of his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less 
painful to him. 

The poet, indeed, restores him in the book ; but in life 



The Booh of Job. 261 

it need not have been so. He might have died upon his 
ash-heap, as thousands of good men have died, and will die 
again, in misery. Happiness, therefore, is not what we are 
to look for. Our place is to be tiue to the best which we 
know, to seek that and do that ; and if by " virtue its own 
reward " be meant that the good man cares only to continue 
good, desiring nothing more, then it is a true and noble say- 
ing. But if virtue be valued because it is politic, because in 
pursuit of it will be found most enjoyment and fewest suffer- 
ings, then it is not noble any more, and it is turning the truth 
of God into a lie. Let us do right, and whether happiness 
come or unhappiness it is no very mighty matter. If it 
come, life will be sweet ; if it do not come, life will be bitter 
— bitter, not sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory 
alone is the government of this world intelligibly just. 
The well-being of our souls depends only on what we 
are ; and nobleness of character is nothing else but steady 
love of good and steady scorn of evil. The government 
of the world" is a problem while the desire of selfish en- 
joyment survives ; and when justice is not done according 
to such standard (which will not be till the day after 
doomsday, and not then), self-loving men will still ask, 
Why ? and find no answer. Only to those who have the 
heart to say, " "We can do without that ; it is not what we 
ask or desire," is there no secret. Man will have what he 
deserves, and will find what is really best for him, exactly 
as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may fly away, 
pleasure pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, 
friends fail or prove unkind, and fame turn to infamy ; but 
the power to serve God never fails, and the love of Him is 
never rejected. 

Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known 
something of love — of that only pure love in which no 
self is left remaining. We have loved as children, we 
have loved as lovers ; some of us have learned to love a 
cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be 



262 The Book of Job. 

which existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. 
Surely there is a love which exults in the power of self- 
abandonment, and can gloty in the privilege of suffering 
for what is good. Que mon nam soitjietri, fourvu que la 
France soit lihre, said Danton ; and those wild patriots who 
had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in 
which they would be rewarded for what they were suifering, 
went to their graves as beds, for the dream of a people's 
liberty. Justice is done ; the balance is not deranged. It 
only seems deranged, as long as we have not learned to 
serve without looking to be paid for it. 

Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the 
Book of Job ; a faith which has flashed up in all times 
and all lands, wherever high-minded men were to be found, 
and which passed in Christianity into the acknowledged 
creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol, the 
Divine sufferer the great example ; and mankind answered 
to the call, because the appeal was not to what was poor 
and selfish in them, but to whatever of best and bravest 
was in their nature. The law of reward and punishment 
was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and 
thou shalt love man ; and that was not love — men knew 
it once — which was bought by the prospect of reward. 
Times are changed with us now. Thou shalt love God 
and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are found 
to mean no more than. Thou shalt love thyself after an 
enlightened manner. And the same base tone has satu- 
rated not only our common feelings, but our Christian 
theologies and our Antichristian philosophies. A prudent 
regard to our future interests ; an abstinence from present 
unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of 
greater pleasure by and by, or perhaps be paid for with 
pain, — this is called virtue now ; and the belief that such 
beings as men can be influenced by any more elevated feel- 
ings, is smiled at as the dream of enthusiasts whose hearts 
have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he were but a 



The Book of Job, 263 

poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on 
the feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his 
own comforts. That were a poor patriot who served h'is 
country for the hire which his country would give to him. 
And we should think but poorly of a son who thus ad- 
dressed his earthly father : " Father, on whom my for- 
tunes depend, teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, 
pleasing thee in all things, may obtain those good things 
which thou hast promised to give to thy obedient children." 
If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith venture, 
by and by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say 
of us (with better reason than he did of Job), " Did they 
serve God for nought, then? Take their reward from 
them, and they will curse him to his face." If Christianity 
had never borne itself more loftily than this, do we sup- 
pose that those fierce Norsemen who had learned, in the 
fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of 
heroes are composed, would have fashioned their sword- 
hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chiv- 
alry ? Let us not dishonor our great fathers with the 
dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the Epi- 
cureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble 
sects of an effete civilization, and would have passed off 
and been heard of no more. It was in another spirit that 
those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their 
warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened pru- 
dence, but purity, justice, goodness ; holding out no prom- 
ises in this world except of suffering as their great Mas- 
ter had suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted 
worthy to suffer for his sake. And that crown of glory 
which they did believe to await them in a life beyond the 
grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in 
life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human 
thought or language can attach to the words ; as little 
like it as the crown of love is like it, which the true lover 
looks for when at last he obtains his mistress. It was to 
be with Christ — to lose themselves in Him. 



264 The Booh of Job, 

How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity 
became what we know it, we are partially beginning to see. 
The living spirit organized for itself a body of perishable 
flesh : not only the real gains of real experience, but mere 
conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the solution 
of unexplained phenomena, i)ecame formulae and articles 
of faith. Again, as before, the living and the dead were 
bound together, and the seeds of decay were already 
planted on the birth of a constructed polity. 

But there was another cause allied to this, and yet dif- 
ferent from it, which, though a law of human nature itself, 
seems nowadays altogether forgotten. , In the rapid and 
steady advance of our knowledge of material things, we 
are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same 
law ; that it is merely generalized experience ; that experi- 
ence accumulates daily ; and, therefore, that " progress of 
the species," in all seiises, is an obvious and necessary fact. 
There is something which is true in this view, mixed with 
a great deal which is false. Material knowledge, the phys- 
ical and mechanical sciences, make their way from step to 
step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is 
secured and made good, and cannot again be lost. One 
generation takes up the general sum of experience where 
the last laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity 
of adding, and leaves it with interest to the next. The 
successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for 
the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily 
cultivated. Prejudices have to be encountered, but prej- 
udices of opinion merely, not prejudices of conscience or 
prejudices of self-love, like those which beset our progress 
in the science of morality. But in morals we enter upon 
conditions wholly different — conditions in which age' dif- 
fers from age, man differs from man, and even from him- 
self, at different moments. We all have experienced times 
when, as we say, we should not know ourselves ; some, 
when we fill below our averaije level ; some, when we are 



The Book of Job, 265 

lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At 
such intervals as these last (unfortunately, with most of us 
of rare occurrence), many things become clear to us which 
before were hard sayings ; propositions become alive which, 
usually, are but dry words ; our hearts seem purer, our 
motives loftier ; our purposes, what we are proud to ac- 
knowledge to ourselves. 

And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his 
neighbor, and period to period. The entire method of ac- 
tion, the theories of human life which in one era prevail 
universally, to tlie next are unpractical and insane, as those 
of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, 
if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we 
may suppose, holds some " greatest nobleness principle," 
the other some " greatest happiness principle ; " and then 
their very systems of axioms will contradict one another ; 
their general conceptions and their detailed interpretations, 
their rules, judgments, opinions, practices, will be in per- 
petual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from 
our hearts, and the fticts of moral experience do not teach 
their own meaning, but submit to many readings according 
to the power of the eye which we bring with us. 

The want of a clear perception of so important a feature 
about us leads to many singular contradictions. A believer 
in popular Protestantism, who is also a believer in progress, 
ought, if he were consistent, to regard mankind as growing 
every day towards a more and more advantageous position 
with respect to the trials of life ; and yet if he were asked 
whether it was easier for him to " save his soul " in the 
nineteenth century than it would have been in the first or 
second, or whether the said soul was necessarily better 
worth saving, he would be perplexed for an answcir. There 
is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like the 
Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had " lived in the 
days of the Fathers," if he had had their advantages, he 
would have found duty a much easier matter ; and some of 



266 The Book of Job. 

us in mature life have felt that, in old Athens, or old re- 
publican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in the 
Crusades, or at the Reformation, there was a contagious 
atmosphere of heroism, in which we should have been less 
troubled with the little feelings which cling about us now. 
At any rate, it is at these rare epochs only that real addi- 
tions are made to our moral knowledge. At such times 
new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods 
longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating 
influence on mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these 
occasions is never entirely lost. The historical monuments 
of their effects are at least indestructible ; and when the 
spirit which gave them birth reappears, their dormant 
energy awakens again. 

But it seems from our present experience of what, in 
some at least of its modern forms, Christianity has been 
capable of becoming, that there is no doctrine in itself so 
pure, but what the meaner nature which is in us can disarm 
and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The once 
living sj^irit dries up into formulae, and formulae, whether 
of mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or " reward 
and punishment," are contrived ever so as to escape mak- 
ing over-high demands upon the conscience. Some aim at 
dispensing with obedience altogether, and those which in- 
sist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest 
of motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all ; 
till, from all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the 
love of self after an enlightened manner; and then nothing 
remains but to figlit the battle over again. The once bene- 
ficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a cruel and mis- 
chievous deception, and the whole question of life and its 
obligations must again be opened. 

It is now some three centuries since the last of such re- 
openings. If we ask ourselves how much during this time 
has been actually added to the sum of our knowledge in 
these matters ; what, in all the thousands upon thousands 



-n 



The Book of Job. 267 

of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which 
Europe has been deluged, has been gained for mankind 
beyond what we have found in this Book of Job, how far 
all this has advanced us in the " progress of humanity," 'it 
were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we 
have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. 
But what moral question can be asked which admits now 
of a grander solution than was offered two, perhaps three, 
thousand years ago ? The world has not been standing 
still ; experience of man and life has increased ; questions 
have multiplied on questions, while the answers of the 
established teachers to them have been growing every day 
more and more incredible. What other answers have there 
been ? Of all the countless books which have appeared, 
there has been only one of enduring importance, in which 
an attempt is made to carry on the solution of the great 
problem. Job is given over into Satan's hand to be 
tempted ; and though he shakes, he does not fall. Taking 
the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly 
exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter suc- 
ceeds. His hero falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime ; 
he becomes a seducer, a murderer, a betrayer, following 
recklessly his evil angel wherever he chooses to lead him ; 
and yet, with all this, he never wholly fprfeits our sympathy. 
In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his higher 
nature ; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoy- 
ment he always longs for something better, and he never 
can be brought to say of evil that it is good. And there- 
fore, after all, the devil is balked of his prey ; in virtue of 
this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped himself re- 
mained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the 
angels. . . It will be eagerly answered for the established 
belief, that such cases are its especial province. All men 
are sinners, and it possesses the blessed remedy for sin. 
But, among the countless numbers of those characters so 
strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and the bright 



268 The Booh of Job. 

fibres cross like a mesh-work ; characters at one moment 
capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by 
temptation into actions which even common men may de- 
plore, how many are there who have never availed them- 
selves of the- conditions of reconciliation as orthodoxy 
proffers them, and of such men what is to be said ? It was 
said once of a sinner that to her " much was forgiven, for 
she loved much." But this is language which theology has 
as little appropriated as the Jews could appropriate the lan- 
guage of Job. It cannot recognize the power of the human 
heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good against 
the evil ; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes 
before it, it can but tremblingly count up the offenses com- 
mitted, and then, looking to the end, and finding its own 
terms not to have been complied with, it faintly mutters its 
anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and judge ; and for 
the poor acts of struggling heroism, " Forasmuch as they 
were not done," &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the 
nature of sin.^ 

Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but 
it cannot be said that he has resolved it ; or at least that 
he has furnished others with a solution which may guide 
their judgment. In the writer of the Book of Job there 
is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as in 
the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against 
which he contended is not set aside or denied; he sees 
what truth is in it ; only he sees more than it, and over it, 
and through it. But in Goethe, who needed it more, inas- 
much as his problem was more delicate and difficult, the 
moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We can- 
not feel that in dealing with sin he entertains any great 
horror of it ; he looks on it as a mistake, as undesirable, 
but scarcely as more. Goethe's great powers are of an- 
other kind ; and this particular question, though in appear- 
ance the primary subject of the poem, is really only sec- 
1 See the Thirteenth Article. 



• The Booh of Job. 269 

ondary. In substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes 
than it is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of 
a largely gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the 
heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleas- 
ure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; 
and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofit- 
able mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably 
be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will 
scarcely be more clear under other circumstances than it 
is at present, and lies in the disposition of the emotions, 
and not in any proposition which can be addressed to the 
understanding. 

For that other question, — how rightly to estimate a hu- 
man being ; what constitutes a real vitiation of character, 
and how to distinguish, without either denying the good or 
making light of the evil ; how to be just to the popular 
theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness 
and injustice, — that is a problem for us, for the solution 
of which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, 
without any recognized guidance whatsoever. 

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situa- 
tion. There can scarcely be a more startling contrast be- 
tween fact and theory than the conditions under which, 
jDractically, positions of power and influence are distributed 
among us, — between the theory of human worth which 
the necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory 
which we believe that we believe. As we look around 
among our leading men, our statesmen, our legislators, the 
judges on our bench, the commanders of our armies, the 
men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of 
its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be 
the principles which guide our selection ? How entirely do 
they lie beside and beyond the negative tests! and how 
little respect do we pay to the breach of this or that com- 
mandment in comparison with ability ! So wholly impos- 
sible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to 



270 The Book of Joh, 

practice, — to treat men known to be guilty of what" the- 
ology calls deadly sins, as really guilty of them, that it 
would almost seem we had fallen into a moral anarchy ; 
that ability alone is what we regard, without any reference 
at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral dis- 
qualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living 
men ; it is worse than invidious to drag out of their graves 
men who have gone down into them with honor, to make a 
point for an argument. But we know, all of us, that among 
the best servants of our country there have been, and there 
are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the nega- 
tive tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, 
or to have repented, of their sins according to recognized 
methods. 

Once more : among our daily or weekly confessions, 
which we are supposed to repeat as if we were all of us at 
all times in precisely the same moral condition, we are 
made to say that we have done those things which we 
ought not to have done, and to have left undone those 
things which we ought to have done. An earthly father to 
whom his children were day after day to make this ac- 
knowledgment would be apt to inquire whether they were 
trying to do better — whether, at any rate, they were en- 
deavoring to learn ; and if he were told that although they 
had made some faint attempts to understand the negative 
part of their duty, yet that of the positive part, of those 
things which they ought to do, they had no notions at all, 
and had no idea that they were under obligation to form 
any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about 
them. But, really and truly, what practical notions of 
duty have we beyond that of abstaining from committing 
sins ? Not to commit sin, we suppose, covers but a small 
part of what is expected of us. Through the entire tissue 
of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop 
Butler tells us, for instance, that even of our time there 
is a portion which is ours, and a portion which is our 



The Book of Joh. 271 

neighbor's ; and if we spend more of it on personal inter- 
ests than our own share, we are stealing. This sounds 
strange doctrine ; we prefer making vague acknowledg- 
ments, and shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say 
vaguely, that in all we do we should consecrate ourselves to 
God, and our own lips condemn us ; for who among us 
cares to learn the way to do it ? The devoir of a knight 
was understood in the courts of chivalry ; the lives of 
heroic men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before 
the world as patterns of detailed imitation ; and now, when 
such ideals are wanted more than ever, Protestantism stands 
with a drawn sword on the threshold of the inquiry, and 
tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been 
fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthless- 
ness, and our business is to appropriate another's righteous- 
ness, and not, like Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane 
efforts of our own. Protestants, we know very well, will 
cry out in tones loud enough at such a representation of 
their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may 
feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try, 
— that they can purify themselves, can live noble and 
worthy lives, — unless this is set befdre them as the thing 
which they are to do, and can succeed in doing, they will 
not waste their energies on what they know beforehand will 
end in failure ; and if they may not live for God, they will 
live for themselves. 

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is; 
a mesh-work of duty woven of living fibre, and the condi- 
tion of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it, of its 
own free energy, shall do what it ought. The penalties of 
duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins 
committed ; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable 
and sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labor, 
supposes that he has no duty except to keep what he calls 
the commandments in his own person, to go to church, and 
to do what he will with his own, — and Irish famines fol- 



272 The Booh of Job. 

low, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. 
We look for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, 
and there is but one remedy which will avail — that the 
thing which we call public opinion learn something of the 
meaning of human obligation, and demand some approxi- 
mation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a 
human beino; ouoht to be. After the first rudimental con- 
ditions, we pass at once into meaningless generalities ; and 
with no knowledge to guide our judgment, we allow it to 
be guided by meaner princiiDles ; we respect money, we 
respect rank, we respect ability — character is as if it had 
no existence. 

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in 
which so many of us at present are agreed to believe, which 
is, indeed, the common meeting point of all the thousand 
sects into which we are split,* it is with saddened feelings 
that we see so little of it in so large a matter. Progress 
there is in knowledge ; and science has enabled the number 
of human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be 
indefinitely multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if 
the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, the 
full and the hungry, remains unaffected. And we cheat 
ourselves with words when we conclude out of our material 
splendor an advance of the race. 

In two things there is progress — progress in knowledge 
of the outward world, and jDrogress in material wealth. 
This last, for the present, creates, perhaps, more evils than 
it relieves ; but suppose this difficulty solved — suppose the 
wealth distributed, and every peasant living like a peer — 
what then ? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs the 
whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle 
of the universe — the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, 
nor the ear with hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, 
and they will hide as many aching hearts as hovels of straw. 
The well-being of mankind is not advanced a single step. 
Knowledge is power, and wealth is power ; and harnessed. 



The Book of JoK 273 

as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided 
by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars ; 
but left to their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, 
the wild horses may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, 
and set a world on fire. - 



18 



SPINOZA. 



Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque 
Felicitate Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum 
Theologico-Politicum. Edidit et illustravit Edwardus Boeh- 
MER. Halse ad Salam. J. F. Lippert. 1852. 

This little volume is one evidence among many of the 
interest which continues to be felt by the German stu- 
dents in Spinoza. The actual merit of the book itself is 
little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which 
they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any 
traces of him which they can recover ; and the smallest 
fragments of his writings are acquiring that factitious im- 
portance which attaches to the most insignificant relics 
of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be 
otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present 
altogether wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought 
to light which will further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. 
He himself spent the better part of his life in clearing his 
language of ambiguities ; and such earlier sketches of his 
system as are supposed still to be extant in MS., and a 
specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have 
discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need 
of additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the 
contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces 
of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his 
friends' correspondence, we know only enough to feel how 
vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often that any 

1 Westminster Review, 1854. 



Spinoza, 275 

man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as 
Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events 
connected with it, but because (and no sympathy with his 
peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his merit) he 
was one of the very best men whom these modern times 
have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown 
upon the world when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he 
resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged 
upon him to come forward in the world. He refused 
pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained 
himself with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an 
art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he 
excelled the best workmen in Holland ; and when he died, 
which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection wath 
which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the in- 
dorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his 
executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza of 
" blessed memory." 

The account which remains of him we owe, not to an 
admiring disciple, but to a clergyman to whom his theories 
were detestable ; and his biographer allows that the most 
malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his 
character — that, except so far as his opinions were blam- 
able, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. 
We desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid 
offensive collision with popular prejudices ; still less shall 
we place ourselves in antagonism with the earnest convic- 
tions of serious persons: our business is to relate what 
Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own conclu- 
sions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life 
of such a man, — a lesson which he taught equally by. ex- 
ample and in word, — that wherever there is genuine and 
thorough love for good and goodness, no speculative super- 
structure of opinion can be so extravagant as to forfeit 
those graces which are promised, not to clearness of intel- 
lect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful 



276 Spinoza. 

language, — " Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum veras 
fidei Catholicae signum est, et veri Spiritus Sancti fructus : 
et ubiciimque haec reperiuntur, ibi Christiis re vera est, et 
ubiciimque base desunt deest Christus : solo namque Cbristi 
Spiritii duci possiimus in amorem justitiae et caritatis." We 
may deny his conclusions ; we may consider his system of 
thought preposterous and even pernicious ; but we cannot 
refuse him the respect which is the right of all sincere and 
honorable men. Wherever and on whatever questions good 
men are found ranged on opposite sides, one of three alter- 
natives is always true : either the points of disagreement 
are purely speculative and of no moral importance; or 
there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same 
thing is meant under a difference of words ; or else the 
real truth is something different from what is held by any 
of the disputants, and each is representing some important 
element which the others ignore or fbro^et. In either case, 
a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we 
would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose 
it with success ; Spinoza's influence over European thought 
is too great to be denied or set aside ; and if his doctrines 
be false in part, or false altogether, we cannot do their 
work more surely than by calumny or misrepresentation — 
a most obvious truism, which no one now living will deny 
in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will 
begin to produce some effect upon the popular judgment. 

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, 
we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the 
first and only logical form which as yet it has assumed. 
Whatever may have been the case with Spinoza's disciples, 
in the author of this system there was no unwillingness to 
look closely at it, or to follow it out to its conclusions ; and 
whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at least 
he has done as much as with lans^uage can be done to 
make himself thoroughly understood. 

And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been 



Spinoza. 277 

a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder 
and Schleiermacher school have claimed him as a Chris- 
tian — a position which no little disguise was necessary to 
make tenable ; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics 
have called him an Atheist — which is still more extrava- 
gant ; and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been 
expected, would have had something reasonable to say, could 
find no better name for him than a Gott trunhner Mann 
— a God-intoxicated man : an expression which has been 
quoted by every body who has since written upon the sub- 
ject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously 
pregnant sayings usually are. With due allowance for 
exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the 
Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Sweden- 
borg ; but with what, justice can it be applied to the cau- 
tious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about 
with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, and 
who gave them at last to the world in a form more severe 
than with such subjects had ever been so much as at- 
tempted before ? With him, as with all great men, there 
was no effort afler sublime emotions. He was a plain, 
practical person ; his object in philosophy was only to find 
a rule by which to govern his own actions and his own 
judgment ; and his treatises contain no more than the con- 
clusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, 
with the grounds on which he rested them. 

We cannot do better than follow his own account of him- 
self, as he has given it in the opening of his unfinished 
Tract, " De Emendatione Intellectus." His language is 
very beautiful, but it is elaborate and full; and, as we 
have a long journey before us, we must be content to epito- 
mize it. 

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking 
himself what was his place and business there, he turned 
for examples to his fellow-men, and found little that he 
could venture to imitate. He observed them all in their 



278 Spinoza. 

several ways governing themselves by their different no- 
tions of what they thought desirable ; while these notions 
themselves were resting on no more secure foundation than 
a vague, inconsistent experience : the experience of one 
was not the experience of another, and thus men were all, 
so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, 
and the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their 
mistakes arose, as it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate 
knowledge ; things which at one time looked desirable, 
disappointed expectation when obtained, and the wiser 
course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. 
He desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to 
endeavor to find, by some surer method, where the real 
good of man actually lay. We must remember that he 
had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out of 
the Jews' communion ; his mind was therefore in contact 
with the bare facts of life, with no creed or system lying 
between them and himself as the interpreter of experience. 
He was thrown on his own resources to find his way for 
himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms 
of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit 
of the certainty which he required. If certain knowledge 
were attainable at all, it must be looked for under the 
mathematical or demonstrative method ; by tracing from 
ideas clearly conceived the consequences which were for- 
mally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas — 
these verce idece, as he calls them — and how were they to 
be obtained? If they were to serve as the axioms of his 
system, they must be self-evident truths, of which no proof 
was required ; and the illustration which he gives of the 
character of such ideas is ingenious and Platonic. 

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza 
says, we require others with which to manufacture it ; and 
others again to manufacture those ; and it would seem 
thus as if the process must be an infinite one, and as if 
nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has 



Spinoza. 279 

provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord 
certain rude instruments, with the help of which we can 
make others better; and others again with the help of 
those. And so he thinks it must be with the mind ; there 
must be somewhere similar original instruments provided 
also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To dis- 
cover these, he examines the various senses in which men 
are said to know any thing, and he finds that they resolve 
themselves into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four. 
"We know a thing — 

i. Ex mero auditu : because we have heard it from 

some person or persons whose veracity we have no 

reason to question, 
jl^ -s ii. Ah experientid vagd : from general experience : 

for instance, all facts or phenomena which come to 

us through our senses as phenomena, but of the 

causes of which we are ignorant. 

2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the 
laws of its phenomena, and see them following in their se- 
quence in the order of Nature. 

3. Finally, we know a thing, ex scientid intuitivd, which 
alone is absolutely clear and certain. 

To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to 
find a fourth proportional which shall stand to the third of 
three numbers as the second does to the first. The mer- 
chant's clerk knows his rule ; he multiplies the second into 
the third and divides by the first. He neither knows nor 
cares to know why the result is the number which he seeks, 
but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remem- 
bers it. 

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a va- 
riety of simple cases ; he has discovered the rule by induc- 
tion, but still does not understand it. 

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathemat- 
ically, as he has found them in Euclid or other geometrical 
treatise. 



280 Spinoza, 

A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for 
himself by simple intuitive force that 1 : 2^3 : 6. 

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth 
alone deserve to be called knowledge, the others being no 
more than opinions more or less justly founded. The last 
is the only real insight, although the third, being exact in 
its form, may be depended upon as a basis of certainty. 
Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very 
simplest truths, non nisi simplicissimcE veritates, can be per- 
ceived ; but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all 
after-science ; and the true ideas, the ver{B idece, which are 
apprehended by this faculty of intuition, are the primitive 
instruments with which Nature has furnished us. If we 
ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has none to 
give us. " Veritas," he says to his friends, in answer to 
their question, " Veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se 
ipsam patefacit." All original truths are of such a kind that 
they cannot without absurdity even be conceived to be false > 
the opposites of them are contradictions in terms. "Ut 
sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius scire. Hinc patet 
quod certitudo nihil est praster ipsam essentiam objecti- 
vam. . . . Cum itaque Veritas nullo egeat signo, sed suffi- 
ciat habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est 
ideas, ut omne tollatur dubium ; hinc sequitur quod vera 
non est methodus, signum veritatis quaerere post acquisi- 
tionem idearum ; sed quod vera methodus est via, ut ipsa 
Veritas, aut essentise objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia ilia 
idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur." {De Emend. 
Intell.) 

Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of tht 
nineteenth century in arguments like these. When we 
remember the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth of 
which their several advocates have as little doubted as 
they have doubted their own existence, we require some 
better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty ; and Aris- 
totle's less pretending canon promises a safer road. '^0 



Spinoza, 281 

iraa-L SoKet, " what all men think," says Aristotle, tovto cTi/at 
cfidfji€v " this we say is" — " and if you will not have this to 
be a fair ground of conviction, you will scarcely find one 
which will serve you better." We are to see, however, 
what these idece are which are offered to us as self-evident. 
Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce con- 
viction, nothing more is to be said ; but it does, indeed, 
appear strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to 
the validity of his canon, when his friends, every one of 
them, so floundered and stumbled among what he regarded 
as his simplest propositions ; when he found them, in spite 
of all that he could say, requiring endless signa veritatis, 
and unable for a long^ time even to understand their mean- 
ing, far less to " recognize them as elementary certainties." 
Modern readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate. We 
produce at length the definitions and axioms of the first 
book of the " Ethica," and they may judge for them- 
selves : — 

DEFINITIONS. 

1. By a thing which is causa sui, its own cause, I mean a thing 
the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which 
cannot be conceived except as existing. 

2. I call a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be limited by 
another (or others) of the same nature — e. g. a given body is 
called finite, because we can always conceive another body en- 
veloping it ; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by 
body. 

3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived 
by itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the 
conception of any thing else as the cause of it. 

4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of sub- 
stance as constituting the essence of substance. 

5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that Avhich is in 
something else, by and through which it is conceived. 

6. God is a being absolutely infinite ; a substance consisting of 
infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and infinite 



282 Spinoza. 



EXPLANATION. 

I say absolutely infinite, not infinite suo genere — for of what is 
infinite suo genere only, the attributes are not infinite but finite ; 
whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own essence 
every thing by which substance can be expressed, and which 
involves no impossibility. 

DEFINITIONS. 

7. That thing is " free " which exists by the sole necessity of 
its own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. 
That is " not free " which is called into existence by something 
else, and is determined in its operation according to a fixed and 
definite method. 

8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessa- 
rily and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal. 

EXPLANATION. 

Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity, 
and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the 
duration be without beginning or end. 

So far the definitions ; then follow the 

AXIOMS. * 

1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue 
of something else. 

2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of some- 
thing else, we must conceive through and in itself. 

3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if 
there be no given cause no eff*ect can follow. 

4. Things which have nothing in common with each other can- 
not be understood through one another — i. e. the conception of 
one does not involve the conception of the other. 

5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the 
cause of it. 

6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its ideate. 

7. The essence of any thing which can be conceived as non- 
existent does not involve existence. 

Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with 



Spinoza. 283 

which to start upon our enterprise of learning. The larger 
number of them, so far from being simple, must be abso- 
lutely without meaning to persons whose minds are undis- 
ciplined in metaphysical abstraction; they become only 
intelligible propositions as we look back upon them with 
the light of the system which they are supposed to contain. 

Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such 
unlooked-for difficulties, the important question, after all, 
is not of the obscurity of these axioms, but of their truth. 
Many things in all the sciences are obscure to an unprac- 
ticed understanding, which are true enough and clear 
enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and they 
may be fairly made the foundations of a scientific system, 
although rudimentary students must be contented to accept 
them upon faith. Of course, also, it is entirely competent 
to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms which he 
intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood 
that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply 
only to the ideas so defined, and not to any supposed 
object existing whicli corresponds with them. Euclid 
defines his triangles and circles, and discovers that to 
figures so described certain properties previously unknown 
may be proved to belong. But as in Nature there are no 
such things as triangles and circles exactly answering the 
definition, his conclusions, as applied to actually existing 
objects, are either not true at all or only proximately so. 
Whether it be possible to bridge over the gulf between 
existing things and the abstract conception of them, as 
Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a 
royal road to certainty if it be a practicable one ; but we 
cannot say that we ever met any one who could say hon- 
estly Spinoza's reasonings had convinced him ; and power 
of demonstration, like all other powers, can be judged 
only by its effects. Does it prove ? does it produce con- 
viction ? If not, it is nothing. 

We need not detain our readers among these abstrac- 



284 Spinoza. 

tions. The power of Spinozism does not lie so remote 
from ordinary appreciation, or we should long ago have 
heard the last of it. Like all other systems which have 
attracted followers, it addresses itself, not to the logical 
intellect, but to the imagination, which it affects to set 
aside. We refuse to submit to the demonstrations by 
which it thrusts itself upon our reception ; but regarding 
it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the nature of the 
world of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves 
how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these 
things we know that there must be, and the curiosity 
which asks the question regards itself, of course, as com- 
petent in some degree to judge of the answer to it. 

Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy 
in the aspect in which it is really powerful, we must clear 
our way through the fallacy of the method. 

The system is evolved in a series of theorems in se- 
verely demonstrative order out of the definitions and axi- 
oms which we have translated. To propositions 1-6 we 
have nothing to object ; they will net, probably, convey 
any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and 
seem to follow (as far as we can speak of " following " in 
such subjects) by fair reasoning. " Substance is prior in 
Nature to its affections." " Substances with different at- 
tributes have nothing in common," and, therefore, " one 
cannot be the cause of the other." " Things really dis- 
tinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute 
or mode (there being nothing else by which they can be 
distinguished), and, therefore, because things modally dis- 
tinguished do not qua substance differ from one another, 
there cannot be more than one substance of the same 
attribute. Therefore (let us remind our readers that we 
are among what Spinoza calls notiones simplicissimas), 
since there cannot be two substances of the same attribute, 
and substances of different attributes cannot be the cause 
one of the other, it follows that no substance can be pro- 
duced by another substance." 



Spinoza, 285 

The existence of substance, he then concludes, is in- 
volved in the nature of the thing itself Substance exists. 
It does and must. We ask, why ? and we are answered, 
because there is nothing capable of producing it, and there- 
fore it is self-caused — i. e. by the first definition the 
essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is 
astonishing that Spinoza should not have seen that he 
assumes the fact that substance does exist in order to prove 
that it must. If it cannot be produced and exists, then, 
of course, it exists in virtue of its own nature. But sup- 
posing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion, the 
proof falls to pieces. We have to fall back on the facts of 
experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that 
the thing which we call the world, and the personalities 
which we call ourselves, are a real substantial something, 
before we find ground of any kind to stand upon. Con- 
scious of the infirmity of his demonstration, Spinoza winds 
round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never 
escaping the same vicious circle : substance exists because 
it exists, and the ultimate experience of existence, so far 
from being of that clear kind which can be accepted as an 
axiom, is the most confused of all our sensations. What is 
existence ? and what is that something which w^e say 
exists ? Things — essences — existences ! these are but 
the vague names with which faculties, constructed only to 
deal with conditional phenomena, disguise their incapacity. 
The world in the Hindoo legend was supported upon the 
back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and 
nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with 
ideas of a fictitious resting-place. 

If any one affirms (says Spinoza) that he has a clear, distinct 
— that is to say, a true — idea of substance, but that nevertheless 
he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is the same as 
if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet was uncertain 
whether it was not false. Or if he says that substance can be cre- 
ated, it is like saying that a false idea can become a true idea — 



286 Spinoza, 

as absurd a thing as It is possible to conceive ; and therefore the 
existence of substance, as well as the essence of it, must be ac- 
knowledged as an eternal verity. 

It is again the same story. Spinoza speaks of a clear 
idea of substance ; but he has not proved that such an idea 
is within the compass of the mind. A man's own notion 
that he sees clearly, is no proof that he really sees clearly ; 
and the distinctness of a definition in itself is no evidence 
that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No 
doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as 
an existing thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that 
substance so exists. This is merely to say that as long as 
a man is certain of this or that fact, he has no doubt of it. 
But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's will be of any use 
to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot recognize 
the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at. 

From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the 
existence of God. After a few more propositions, follow- 
ing one another with the same kind of coherence, we arrive 
successively at the conclusion that there is but one sub- 
stance ; that this substance being necessarily existent, it is 
also infinite ; that it is therefore identical with the Being 
who had been previously defined as the " Ens absolute 
perfectum." 

Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of 
the period. Descartes had set the example of construct 
ing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, 
and many others besides Spinoza. The inconclusiveness 
of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in 
the strangely ojDposite conceptions formed by all these 
writers of the nature of that Being whose existence they 
nevertheless agreed, by the same process, to gather each 
out of their ideas. It is important, however, to examine it 
carefully, for it is the very key-stone of the Pantheistic 
system. 

As stated by Descartes, the argument stands something 



Spinoza, 287 

as follows : — God is an all-perfect Being, — perfection is 
the idea which we form of Him : existence is a mode of 
perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism we are 
told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea — as 
much involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from 
the centre to the circumference of a circle is involved in 
the idea of a circle. A non-existent all-perfect Being is 
as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle. 

It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove 
the existence of any thing — Titans, Chimaeras, or the 
Olympian gods ; we have but to define them as existing, 
and the proof is complete. But, this objection summarily 
set aside ; none of these beings are by hypothesis abso- 
lutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can 
conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we may 
say, that of such terms as perfection and existence we know 
too little to speculate. Existence may be an imperfection 
for all we can tell ; we know nothing about the matter. 
Such arguments are but endless petitiones principii — like 
the self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into noth- 
ing. We wander round and round them, in the hope of 
finding some tangible point at which we can seize their 
meaning ; but we are presented everywhere with the same 
impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off inef- 
fectual. 

Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense con- 
viction of the validity of his argument. His opinion is 
stated with sufficient distinctness in one of his letters. 
" Nothing is more clear," he writes to his pupil De Vries, 
" than that, on the one hand, every thing which exists is 
conceived by or under some attribute or other ; that the 
more reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more at- 
tributes must be assigned to it ; " " and conversely " (and 
this he calls his argumentum palmarium in proof of the ex- 
istence of God), " the more attributes I assign to a thing, the 
more I am forced to conceive it as existing'^ Arrange the 



288 Spinoza. 

argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form 
clearer than this: — The more perfect a thing is, the more 
it must exist (as if existence could admit of more or less) ; 
and therefore the all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. 
There is no flaw, we are told, in the reasoning ; and if we 
are not convinced, it is from the confused habits of our own 
minds. 

Some persons may think that all arguments are good 
when on the right side, and that it is a gratuitous imperti- 
nence to quarrel with the proofs of a conclusion which it is 
so desirable that all should receive. As yet, however, we 
are but inadequately acquainted with the idea attached by 
Spinoza to the word " perfection ; " and if we commit our- 
selves to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected conse- 
quences. All such reasonings presume, as a first condi- 
tion, that we men possess faculties capable of dealing with 
absolute ideas ; that we can understand the nature of 
things external to ourselves as they really are in their ab- 
solute relation to one another, independent of our own con- 
ception. The question immediately before us is one which 
can never be determined. The truth which is to be proved 
is one which we already believe ; and if, as we believe also, 
our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our own 
existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can 
never adequately be analyzed; we cannot say exactly what 
they are, and therefore we cannot say what they are not. 
Whatever we receive intuitively, we receive without proof; 
and, stated as a naked proposition, it must involve a petitio 
principii. We have a right, however, to object at once to 
an arorument in which the conclusion is more obvious 
than the premises ; and if it lead on to other consequences 
which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without 
difficulty or hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, 
because we experience the control of a " power " which is 
stronger than we ; and our instincts teach us so much of 
the nature of that power as our own relation to it requires 



Spinoza, 289 

lis to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is 
due ; and the perfections which we attribute to Him are 
those moral perfections which are the proper object of our 
reverence. Strange to say, the perfections of Spinoza, 
which appear so clear to him, are without any moral char- 
acter whatever ; and for men to speak of the justice of 
God, he tells us, is but to see in Him a reflection of them- 
selves ; as if a triangle were to conceive of Him as eminen- 
ter triangularis, or a circle to give Him the property of 
circularity. 

Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves 
among ideas, which at least are intelligible, if the charac- 
ter of them is as far removed as before from the circle of 
ordinary thought. Nothing exists except substance, the 
attributes under which substance is expressed, and the 
modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one 
substance self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the 
absolutely Infinite all-perfect Being. Substance cannot 
produce substance, and therefore there is no such thing as 
creation ; and every thing which exists is either an attri- 
bute of God, or an affection of some attribute of Him, 
modified in this manner or in that. Beyond Him there is 
nothing, and nothing like Him or equal to Him ; He there- 
fore alone in himself is absolutely free, uninfluenced by 
any thing, for nothing is except himself ; and from Him 
and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence (for 
these words mean the same thing), all things have neces- 
sarily flowed, and will and must flow forever, in the same 
manner as from the nature of a triangle it follows, and has 
followed, and will follow from eternity to eternity, that the 
angles of it are equal to two right angles. It would seem 
as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon words, 
and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical 
demonstration we speak of one thing as following from 
another. The properties of a curve or a triangle are what 
they are at all times, and the sequence is merely in the 

19 



290 Spinoza. 

order in which they are successively known to ourselves. 
But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence ; 
and what we call the universe, and all the series of inci- 
dents in earth or planet, are involved formally and mathe- 
matically in the definition of God. 

Each attribute is infinite siio genere ; and it is time that 
we should know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza at- 
taches to that important word. Out of the infinite number 
of the attributes of God, two only, he says, are known to 
us — " extension," and " thought," or " mind." Duration, 
even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attri- 
bute ; it is not even a real thing. Time has no relation to 
Being, conceived mathematically ; it would be absurd to 
speak of circles or triangles as any older to-day than they 
were at the beginning of the world. These and every 
thing of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly 
says, siih quddam specie ceternitatis. But extension, or sub- 
stance extended, and thought, or substance perceiving, are 
real, absolute, and objective. We must not confound ex- 
tension with body ; for though body be a mode of exten- 
sion, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite 
because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself 
— or, in other words, to be limited at all. And as it is 
with extension, so it is with mind, which is also infinite with 
the infinity of its object. Thus there is no such thing as 
creation, and no beginning or end. All things of which 
our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these at- 
tributes are produced from God, and in Him they have their 
being, and without Him they would cease to be. 

Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most 
admirably indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to 
the spirit of it), we learn that God is the only causa libera ; 
that no other thing or being has any power of self-deter- 
mination ; all moves by fixed laws of causation, motive 
upon motive, act upon act ; there is no free will, and no 
contingency ; and however necessary it may be for our in- 



Spinoza. 291 

capacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent 
(see Tractat. Theol. Polit. cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of 
the thousand convenient deceptions which we are obUged 
to employ with ourselves. God is the causa immanens om- 
nium ; He is not a personal being existing apart from the 
universe ; but himself in his own reality, He is expressed 
in the universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to 
the philosophical language of the time, Spinoza preserves 
the distinction between natura naturans and natura natu- 
rata. The first is being in itself, the attributes of substance 
as they are conceived simply and alone ; the second is the 
infinite series of modifications which follow out of the prop- 
erties of these attributes. And thus all which ^5, is what it 
is by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other 
than it is. God is free, because no causes external to him- 
self have power over Him ; and as good men are most free 
when most a law to themselves, so it is no infringement on 
God's freedom to say that He must have acted as He has 
acted, but rather He is absolutely free because absolutely a 
law himself to himself. 

Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics — the book 
which contains, as we said, the notiones simplicissimas, and 
the primary and rudimental deductions from them. lEs 
Dei naturam, he says, in his lofty confidence, ejusque pro- 
prietates explicui. But, as if conscious that his. method 
will never convince, he concludes this portion of his sub- 
ject with an analytical appendix ; not to explain or apolo- 
gize, but to show us clearly, in practical detail, the position 
into which he has led us. The root, we are told, of all phi- 
losophical errors lies in our notion of final causes ; we 
invert the order of Nature, and interpret God's action 
through our own ; we speak of his intentions, as if He were 
a man ; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, 
and finally erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the 
centre and criterion of all things. Hence arises our notion 
of evil. If the universe be what this philosophy has de- 



292 Spinoza. 

scribed it, the perfection which it assigns to God is extended 
to every thing, and evil is of course impossible ; there is 
no short-coming either in Nature or in man ; each person 
and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be, and 
nothing more. But men imagining that all things exist on 
their account, and perceiving their own interests, bodily 
and spiritual, capable of being variously affected, have con- 
ceived these opposite influences to result from opposite and 
contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their 
advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our 
convenience we form generic conceptions of human excel- 
lence, as archetypes after which to strive ; and such of us 
as approach nearest to such archetypes are supposed to be 
virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be 
wicked. But such generic abstractions are but entia imag- 
inationis^ and have no real existence. In the eyes of God 
each thing is what it has the means of being. There is no 
rebellion against him, and no resistance of his will ; in 
truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing as 
a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions 
are good or bad, not in themselves, but as compared with 
the nature of the agent : what we censure in men, we tolerate 
and even admire in animals ; and as soon as we are aware 
of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free volition, 
our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist. 

If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were 
not created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason ? it was 
because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all 
things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection ; or, to 
speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were am- 
ple enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be 
conceived by an Infinite Intelligence. 

It is possible that readers who have followed us so far 
will now turn away from a philosophy which issues in such 
conclusions ; resentful, perhaps, that it should have been 
ever laid before them at all, in language so little expressive 



Spinoza. 293 

of aversion and displeasure. We must claim, however, in 
Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for himself. His 
system must be judged as a whole ; and whatever we may- 
think ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines 
if they were generally received, in his hands and in his 
heart they are worked into maxims of the purest and lof- 
tiest morality. And at least we are bound to remember 
that some account of this great mystery of evil there must 
be ; and although familiarity with commonly received ex- 
planations may disguise from us the difficulties with which 
they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such 
difficulties none the less exist. The fact is the grand per- 
plexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theo- 
ries about it Spinoza's would aj^pear to us the least irra- 
tional, setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, 
aside. The objections, with the replies to them, are well 
drawn out in the correspondence with William de Bly en- 
burg. It will be seen at once with how little justice the 
denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent 
to denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral 
distinctions between virtue and vice. 

We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had 
urged something of the kind) — we speak of this or that man hav- 
ing done a wrong thing, when we compare him with a general 
standard of humanity ; but inasmuch as God neither perceives 
things in such abstract manner, nor forms to himself such generic 
definitions, and since there is no more reality in any thing than 
God has assigned to it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good 
exists only in respect of man's understanding, not in respect of 
God's. 

If this be so, then (repHes Blyenburg), bad men fulfill God's 
will as well as good. 

It is true (Spinoza answers) they fulfill it, yet not as the good, 
nor as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. 
The better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of 
God's spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, 
beino- without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of 



294 Spinoza. 

God, and through which alone we are called (in respect of our 
understandings) his servants, are but as instruments in the hand 
of the artificer — they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in 
their service. 

Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language 
the extreme doctrine of Grace ; and St. Paul, if we inter- 
pret his real belief by the one passage so often quoted, in 
which he compares us to " clay in the hands of the potter, 
who maketh one vessel to honor and another to dishonor," 
may be accused with justice of having held the same opin- 
ion. If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, 
it either becomes an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves it- 
self into the philosophy of Spinoza. It is monstrous to 
call evil a positive thing, and to assert, in the same breath, 
that God has predetermined it, — to tell us that He has or- 
dained what He hates, and hates what He has ordained. It 
is incredible that we should be without power to obey Him 
except through his free grace, and yet be held responsible 
for our failures when that grace has been withheld. And 
it is idle to call a philosopher sacrilegious who has but sys- 
tematized the faith which so many believe, and cleared it 
of its most hideous features. 

Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclu- 
sions either from himself or from his readers. We believe 
for ourselves that logic has no business with such ques- 
tions ; that the answer to them lies in the conscience and 
not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise ; and he is 
at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyen- 
burg presses him with instances of monstrous crime, such 
as bring home to the heart the natural horror of it. He 
speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks if God can 
be called the cause of such an act as that. 

God (replies Spinoza calmly) is the cause of all things which 
have reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express 
any real things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them ; 
but I conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the 



Spinoza. 295 

essence of evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God 
cannot be the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so 
far as it was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother ; 
and we do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the 
latter lay in his being without pity, without obedience, without nat- 
ural affection — none of which things express any positive essence, 
but the absence of it; and therefore God was not the cause of 
these, although he was the cause of the act and the intention. 

But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain in- 
tolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free- 
will remain unremoved. 

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these no- 
tions are as false as Spinoza supposes them — if we have 
no power to be any thing but what we are, there neither is 
nor can be such a thing as moral evil ; and what we call 
crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God, 
they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose 
him to have willed them, than the same actions, whether 
of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals. There 
will be but, as Spinoza says, an infinite gradation in created 
things, the poorest life being more than none, the meanest 
active disposition something better than inertia, and the 
smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. " The 
Lord has made all things for himself, even the wicked for 
the day of evil." 

The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we 
proceed. We pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a 
metaphysical kind, which is best disposed of in passing. 
Whatever obscurity may lie about the thing which we call 
Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it is, or 
whether properly it is any thing), the words past, present, 
future, do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with 
them : things will be which are not yet, and have been 
which are no longer. Now, if every thing which exists be 
a necessary mathematical consequence from the nature or 
definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can 
be any time but the present, or how past and future have 



296 Spinoza, 

room for a meaning. God is, and therefore all properties 
of him are, just as every property of a circle exists in it as 
soon as the circle exists. We may if we like, for conven- 
ience, throw our theorems into the future, and say, e. y. 
that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle 
under the parts of the one ivlll equal that under the parts 
of the other. But we only mean in reality that these 
rectangles are equal ; and the future relates only to our 
knowledge of the fact. Allowing, however, as much as we 
please, that the condition of England a hundred years 
hence lies ah-eady in embryo in existing causes, it is a par- 
adox to say that such condition exists already in the sense 
in which the properties of the circle exist ; and yet Spi- 
noza insists on the illustration. 

It is singular that he should not have noticed the diffi- 
culty ; not that either it or the answer to it (which no 
doubt would have been ready enough) are likely to inter- 
est any person except metaphysicians, a class of thinkers, 
happily, which is rapidly diminishing. 

We proceed to more important matters — to Spinoza's 
detailed theory of Nature as exhibited in man and in man's 
mind. His theory for its bold ingenuity is by far the most 
remarkable which on this dark subject has ever been pro- 
posed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another ques- 
tion ; yet undoubtedly it provides a solution for every diffi- 
culty ; it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of 
materialism and of spiritualism ; and if it be the test of 
the soundness of a philosophy that it will explain phenom- 
ena and reconcile contradictions, it is hard to account for 
the fact that a system which bears such a test so admira- 
bly, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is. 

Most people have heard of the " Harmonic Pre-etablie " 
of Leibnitz ; it is borrowed without acknowledgment from 
Spinoza, and adapted to the Leibnitzian philosophy. 
'•' Man," says Leibnitz, " is composed of mind and body ; 
but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature 



Spinoza. 297 

of their union ? Substances so opposite in kind cannot 
affect one another ; mind cannot act on matter, or matter 
upon mind ; and the appearance of their reciprocal opera- 
tion is an appearance only and a delusion." A delusion so 
general, however, required to be accounted for ; and Leib- 
nitz accounted for it by supposing that God, in creating a 
world composed of material and spiritual phenomena, or- 
dained that these several phenomena should proceed from 
the beginning in parallel lines side by side in a constantly 
corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it 
appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the 
retina. The motion of the arm or the leg appears to re- 
sult from an act of will; but in either case we mistake 
coincidence for causation. Between substances so w^holly 
alien there can be no intercommunion ; and we only sup- 
pose that the object seen produces the idea, and that the 
desire produces the movement, because the phenomena of 
matter and the phenomena of spirit are so contrived as to 
flow always in the same order and sequence. This hypoth- 
esis, as coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, 
at least listened to respectfully ; because while taking it 
out of its proper place, he contrived to graft it upon Chris- 
tianity ; and succeeded, with a sort of speculative legerde- 
main, in making it appear to be in harmony wdth revealed 
religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination, and 
connected with the Christian doctrine of Retribution, it 
steps forward with an air of unconscious innocence, as if 
interfering with nothing which Christians generally believe. 
And yet, leaving as it does no larger scope for liberty or 
responsibility than when in the hands of Spinoza,^ Leibnitz, 

1 Since these words were written a book has appeared in Paris by an 
able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead us to modify the 
opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give our reasons for speakmg 
as we do. 'SI. de Careil * has discovered in the library at Hanover, a MS. 



* Refutation Inerlite de Spinoza. Par Leibnitz. Prdcedee dhme Memoire, par 
Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854. 



298 Spinoza. 

in our opinion, has only succeeded in making it infinitely 
more revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as 
an object of Divine anger and a subject of retributory 

in the handwriting of Leibnitz, containing a series of remarks on the book 
of a certain John Wachter. It does not appear who this John Wachter 
■was, nor by what accident he came to have so distinguished a critic. If we 
may judge by the extracts at present before us, he seems to have been an 
absurd and extravagant person, who had attempted to combine the the- 
ology of the Cabbala with the very little which he was able to understand of 
the philosophy of Spinoza; and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writ- 
ings nor the reflections upon them are of interest to any human being. 
The extravagance of Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with 
an opportunity of noticing the points on which he most disapproved of 
Spinoza himself; and these few notices M. de Careil has now for the first 
time published as The Refutation of Sjnnoza, by Leibnitz. They are ex- 
ceedingly brief and scanty; and the writer of them would assuredly have 
hesitated to describe an imperfect criticism by so ambitious a title. The 
modern editor, however, must be allowed the privilege of a worshiper, 
and we will not quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his 
master had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for Avhat is 
at least a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude which he 
has earned by industry and good will. At the same time, the notes them- 
selves confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz 
did not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the 
followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than 
what he is described in the book before us — if his metaphysic:^ were " mis- 
erable," if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a 
second-rate disciple of Descartes — we can assure M. de Careil that we 
should long ago have heard the last of him. 

There must be something else, something very different from this, to 
explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which 
liis writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of Goethe; the 
fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to mere 
depreciating ci'iticism. This, however, is not a point which there is any 
use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two assertions which 
we have made. First, that Leibnitz borrowed his Theory of the Harmonie 
Pre-etabUe from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and, secondly, that 
this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is that of Spinoza, and 
only dift'ers from it in disguising its real character. 

First for the //armome Pre-etabUe. Spinoza's Ethics appeared in 1G77; 
and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz an- 
nounced as a discovery of his own, a Theorv of The Coimnunication of Sub- 
stances, which he illustrates in the following manner: — 

" Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver ce 
que j'ai avance touchant la communication, ou Pharmonie de deux sub- 



Spinoza. 299 

punishment. He was not a Christian, and made no pre- 
tension to be considered such ; and it did not occur to him 
to regard the actions of a being which, both with Leibnitz 

stances aussi difFerentes que I'ame et le corps? II est vrai que je crois en 
avoir trouv^ le moyen; et voici comment je pretends vous satisfaire. Fi- 
gurez-vous deux horloges ou montres qui s'accordent partaitement. Or 
cela se peut faire de trois manieres. La le consiste dans une influence 
mutuelle. La 2e est d'y attacher un ouvrier habile qui les redresse, et les 
mette d'accord a tous momens. La 3^ est de fabriquer ces deux pendules 
jivec tant d'art et de justesse, qu'oii se puisse assurer de leur accord dans 
la suite. IMettez maintenant Tame et le corps a la place de ces deux pen- 
dules; leur accord peut arriver par I'une de ces trois manieres. La voye 
d'influence est celle de la philosophic vulgaire; mais comrae Ton ne sauroit 
concevoir des particules matt^rielles qui puissent passer d'une de ces sub- 
stances dans I'autre, il laut abandonuer ce sentiment. La voye de Fassist- 
ance eontinuelle du Createur est celle du systeme des causes occasionnelles ; 
mais je tiens que c'est faire intervenir Deus ex machina dans une chose 
uaturelle et ordinaire, ou selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que de la 
maniere qu'il coucoart a toutes les autres choses naturelles. Ainsi il ne 
reste que mon hypoth^se ; c'est-a-dire que la voye de I'harmonie. Dieu a 
fait d^s le commencement chacune de ces deux substances de telle nature, 
qu'en ne suivant que ces propres loix qu'elle a re^ue avec son etre, elle 
s'accorde pourtant avec I'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une influence mu- 
tuelle. ou comme si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au-dela de son concours 
general. Apres cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver a moins qu'on ne 
veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile pour se servir de 
cette artifice," &c. — Leibnitz, Opera, p. 133. Berlin edition, 1840. 

Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with Christian- 
ity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of mind and body 
wears a very difterent aspect under his treatment, from what it wears under 
that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and Leibnitz both agree in this one peculiar 
conception in which they differ from all other philosophers before or after 
them — that mind and body have no direct communication with each other, 
and that the phenomena of them merely correspond. M. de Careil says 
they both borrowed it from Descartes; but that is impossible. Descartes 
held no such opinion; it was the precise point of disagreement at which 
Spinoza parted from him; and therefore, since in point of date Spinoza had 
the advantage of Leibnitz, and we know that Leibnitz was acquainted with 
his writings, we must either suppose that he was directly indebted to 
Spinoza for an obligation which he ought to have acknowledged, or else, 
which is extremely improbal)le, that having read Spinoza and forgotten 
him, he afterwards reoriginated for himself one of the most singuhir and 
peculiar notions which was ever offered to the belief of mankind. 

So much for the first poi-it, which, after all, is but of little moment. It 
is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands of Leibnitz, this the- 



300 Spinoza. 

and himself is (to use his own expression) an automaton 
spirituale, as deserving a fiery indignation and everlasting 
vengeance. 

" Dens," according to Spinoza'^ definition, " est ens con- 
stans infinitis attributis quorum unumquodque aeternam et 

oiy can be any better reconciled with what is commonly meant by religion ; 
whether, that is, the ideas of obedience and disobedience, merit and de- 
merit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under it. Spinoza 
makes no pretension to any thing of the kind, and openly declares that these 
ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes. Leibnitz, in opposition to 
him, endeavors to reestablish them in the following manner. He con- 
ceives that the system of the universe has been arranged and predeter- 
mined from the moment at which it was launched into being; from the 
moment at which God selected it, with all its details, as the best which 
could exist; but that it is carried on by the action of individual creatm'es 
(monads as he calls them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of 
their existence, yet obey them with a "character of spontaneity," which, 
although *' automata," are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the 
consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral praise 
or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere assertion of the 
coexistence of these opposite qualities in the monad man, he has proved 
that such qualities can coexist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a 
circular ellipse, or of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in. 
these matters fi-om which no philosophy can extricate itself. If men can 
incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act 
otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to 
us ; yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely 
of a theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained 
the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the Harmonie Pre-etablie 
might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful. 
It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has no 
natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world may 
be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of its 
existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil ; and although 
Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and Avicked- 
ness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with the reflec- 
tion that this earth might be but one world in the midst of the universe, 
and perhaps the single checkered exception in an infinity of stainless 
globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because it was imper- 
fect; it might pass as a possible conjectm-e on a dark subject, when noth- 
ing better than conjecture was attainable. 

But as soon as we are told that the evil in these human " automata," 
being a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, 
is yet infinitely detestable to God ; that the creatures who suffer under the 
accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's eyes, for 



Spinoza. 301 

infiiiitam essentiam exprimit." Under each of these attri- 
butes infinita sequuntur, and every thing which an infinite 
intelligence can conceive, and an infinite power can pro- 
duce, — every thing which follows as a possibility out of 
the divine nature, — all things which have been, and are, 
and will be, — find expression and actual existence, not 
under one attribute only, but under each and every attri- 
bute. Language is so ill-adapted to explain such a system, 
that even to state it accurately is all but impossible, and 
analogies can only remotely suggest what such expressions 
mean. But it is as if it were said that the same thought 
might be expressed in an infinite variety of languages ; and 
not in words only, but in action, in painting, in sculpture, 
in music, in any form of any kind which can be employed 
as a means of spiritual embodiment. Of all these infinite 
attributes, two only, as we said, are known to us — exten- 
sion and thought. Material phenomena are phenomena of 
extension ; and to every modification of extension an idea 
corresponds under the attribute of thought. Out of such 
a compound as this is formed man, composed of body and 
mind; two parallel and correspondent modifications eter- 
nally answering one another. And not man only, but all 
other beings and things are similarly formed and similarly 
animated; the anima or mind of each varying according to 
the complicity of the organism of its material counterpart. 
Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's power 
of thinking, and mind does not control body, nor commu- 

doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be justly pun- 
ished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox. 

No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this 
belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular creed, 
such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his system; 
and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of Spinoza, whose 
genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep and so enduring, 
while Leibnitz has onh'- secured for himself a mere admiration of his tal- 
ents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be consistent, even at the 
price of the world's reprobation, and refused to purchase the applause of 
his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity. 



302 Sphioza. 

nicate to it either motion or rest or any influence from 
itself, yet body with all its properties is the object or ideate 
of mind : whatsoever body does, mind perceives ; and the 
greater the energizing power of the first, the greater the 
perceiving power of the second. And this is not because 
they are adapted one to the other by some inconceivable 
preordinating power, but because mind and body are una 
et eadem res, the one absolute being affected in one and the 
same manner, but expressed under several attributes ; the 
modes and affections of each attribute having that being 
for their cause, as he exists under that attribute of which 
they are modes, and no other ; idea being caused by idea, 
and body affected by body ; the image on the retina being 
produced by the object reflected upon it, the idea or image 
in our minds by the idea of that object, &c., &c. 

A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking 
on these matters is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly 
speak of it as being probable, or as being improbable. 
Probability extends only to what we can imagine as pos- 
sible, and Spinoza's theory seems to lie beyond the range 
within which our judgment can exercise itself. In our 
own opinion, indeed, as we have already said, the entire 
subject is one with which we have no business; and the 
explanation of our nature, if it is ever to be explained to 
us, is reserved till we are in some other state of existence. 
We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is 
in itself incredible. The chances may be millions to one 
against his being right ; yet the real truth, if we knew it, 
would be probably at least as strange as his conception of 
it. But we are firmly convinced that of these questions, 
and of all like them, practical answers only lie within the 
reach of human faculties; and that in "researches into 
the absolute " we are on the road which ends nowhere. 

Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to 
this philosophy itself, there is one most obvious, namely, 
that if the attributes of God be infinite, and each particular 



Spinoza. 303 

thing is expressed under them all, then mind and body 
express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each 
of ourselves ; and this human nature exists (^. e., there 
exists corresponding modes of substance) in the whole 
infinity of the di^^ne nature under attributes differing each 
from each, and all from mind and all from body. That 
this must be so follows from the definition of the Infinite 
Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two 
attributes which are known to us ; and if this be so, why 
does not the mind perceive something of all these other 
attributes? The objection is well expressed by a corre- 
spondent (Letter 67) : — "It follows from what you say," 
a friend writes to Spinoza, " that the modification which 
constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, 
although it be one and the same modification, yet must be 
expressed in an infinity of ways : one way by thought, a 
second way by extension, a third by some attribute un- 
known to me, and so on to infinity ; the attributes being 
infinite in number, and the order and connection of modes 
being the same in them all. Why, then, does the mind 
perceive the modes of but one attribute only ? " 

Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily, a fragment of 
his letter only is extant, so that it is too brief to be satis- 
factory : — 

In reply to your difficulty (he says), although each particular 
thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes, 
the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and 
the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite 
minds. No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connection with 
another. 

He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives, 
or can perceive, things under their Infinite expression, and 
that the idea of each several mode, under whatever attri- 
bute, constitutes a separate mind. 

We do not know that we can add any thing to this ex- 
planation ; the difficulty lies in the audacious sweep of the 



304 Spinoza. 

speculation itself ; we will, however, attempt an illustration, 
although we fear it will be to illustrate ohscurum per ohscu- 
rius. Let A B C D be four out of the infinite number of 
the Divine attributes. A the attribute of mind ; B the 
attribute of extension ; C and D other attributes, the nature 
of which is not known to us. Now, A, as the attribute of 
mind, is that which perceives all which takes place under 
B C and D, but it is only as it exists in God that it forms 
the universal consciousness of all attributes at once. In its 
modifications it is combined separately with the modifica- 
tions of each, constituting, in combination with the modes 
of each attribute, a separate being. As forming the mind 
of B, A perceives what takes place in B, but not what takes 
place in C or D. Combined with B, it forms the soul of the 
human body, and generally the soul of all modifications of 
extended substance ; combined with C, it forms the soul of 
some other analogous being ; combined with D, again of an- 
other ; but the combinations are only in pairs, in which A is 
constant. A and B make one being, A and C another, A 
and D a third ; but B will not combine with C, nor C with 
D ; each attribute being, as it were, conscious only of itself. 
And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and 
extension which w^e call ourselves, there are corresponding 
modifications under C and D, and generally under each of 
the infinite attributes of God, each of ourselves being in a 
sense infinite — nevertheless, we neither have nor can have 
any knowledge of ourselves in this infinite aspect ; our 
actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of 
sensible experience. 

English readers, however, are likely to care little for all 
this ; they will look to the general theory, and judge of it 
as its aspect affects them. And first, perhaps, they will be 
tempted to throw aside as absurd the notion that their 
bodies go through the many operations which they ex- 
perience them to do, undirected by their minds. It is a 
thing, they may say, at once preposterous and incredible. 



Spinoza. 305 

It is, however, less absurd than it seems ; and, though we 
could not persuade ourselves to believe it, absurd in the 
sense of ha^dng nothing to be said for it, it certainly is not. 
It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human body 
capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of material 
organization, of building a house, than of thinking ; and yet 
men are allowed to say that the body thinks, without being 
regarded as candidates for a lunatic asylum. We see the 
seed shoot up into stem and leaf and throw out flowers ; 
we observe it fulfilling processes of chemistry more subtle 
than were ever executed in Liebig's laboratory, and pro- 
ducing structures more cunning than man can imitate. 
The bird builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate 
web, and stretches it in the path of his prey ; directed not 
by calculating thought, as we conceive ourselves to be, but 
by some motive influence, our ignorance of the nature of 
which we disguise from ourselves, and call it instinct, but 
which we believe at least to be some property residing in the 
organization. We are not to suppose that the human body, 
the most complex of all material structures, has slighter 
powers in it than the bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect. 
Let us listen to SjDinoza himself: — 

There can be no doubt (he says) that this hypothesis is true ; 
but unless I can prove it from experience, men will not, I fear, be 
induced even to reflect upon it calmly, so persuaded are they that 
it is by the mind only that their bodies are set in motion. And 
yet what body can or cannot do no one has yet determined ; 
body, i. e., by the law of its own nature, and without assistance 
from mind. No one has so probed the human frame as to have 
detected all its functions and exhausted the list of them ; there 
are powers exhibited by animals far exceeding human sagacity ; 
and, again, feats are performed by somnambulists on which in the 
waking state the same persons would never venture — itself a 
proof that body is able to accomplish what mind can only -admire. 
Men say that mind moves body, but how it moves it they cannot 
tell, or what degree of motion it can impart to it ; so that, in fact, 
they do not know what they say, and are only confessing their own 



306 Spinoza, 

•ignorcince in specious language. They will answer me, that 
•whether or not they understand how it can be, yet that they are 
assured by plain experience that unless mind could perceive, body 
would be altogether inactive ; they know that it depends on the 
mind whether the tongue speaks or is silent. But do they not 
equally experience that if their bodies are paralyzed their minds 
cannot think ? — that if their bodies are asleep their minds are 
without power ? — that their minds are not at all times equally 
able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but depend on 
the state of their bodies ? And as for experience proving that the 
members of the body can be controlled by the mind, -I fear ex- 
perience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd (they 
rejoin) to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such 
things as pictures, or palaces, or works of art ; the body could not 
build a church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, 
that we do not yet know what body can or cannot do, or what 
would naturally follow from the structure of it ; that we experi- 
ence in the feats of somnambulists something which antecedently 
to that experience would have seemed incredible. This fabric of 
the human body exceeds infinitely any contrivance of human skill, 
and an infinity of things, as I have already proved, ought to fol- 
low from it. 

We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although 
if the matter were one the debating of which could be of 
any profit, it would undoubtedly have its weight, and would 
require to be patiently considered. Life is too serious, 
however, to be wasted with impunity over speculations in 
which certainty is impossible, and in which we are trifling 
with what is inscrutable. 

Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spi- 
noza himself, when he went on to gather out of his philos- 
ophy " that the mind of man being part of the Infinite 
intelligence, when we say that such a mind perceives this 
thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives it, 
not as He is infinite, but as he is represented by the nature 
of this or that idea ; and similarly, when we say that a man 
does this or that action, we say that God does it, not qud 
He is infinite, but qua He is expressed in that man's na- 



Spinoza. 307 

ture." " Here," he says, " many readers will no doubt hes-« 
itate, and many difficulties will occur to them in the way 
of such a supposition." 

We confess that we ourselves are among these hesitat- 
ing readers. As long as the Being whom Spinoza so freely 
names remains surrounded with the associations w^hich in 
this country we bring with us out of our childhood, not all 
the logic in the world would make us listen to language 
such as this. It is not so, — we know it, and that is enough. 
We are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie 
about our theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if 
religion depended on speculative consistency, and not in 
obedience of life, to perplex and terrify us. What are we ? 
what is any thing ? If it be not divine — what is it then ? 
If created — out of what is it created ? and how created 
— and why ? These questions, and others far more mo- 
mentous which we do not enter upon here, may be asked 
and cannot be answered ; but we cannot any the more con- 
sent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently 
provides an answer ; because, as we have said again and 
again, we do not care to have them answered at all. Con- 
science is the single tribunal to which we choose to be 
referred, and conscience declares imperatively that what 
he says is not true. It is painful to speak of all this, and 
as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not 
Atheism, but the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Nega- 
tive are not so remote from one another in their practical 
bearings ; only let us remember that we are far indeed 
from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was nothing 
else but that world which we experience. It is but one of 
infinite expressions of Him — a conception which makes us 
giddy in the effort to realize it. 

We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole 
matter in its bearings upon life and human duty. It was 
in the search after this last, that Spinoza, as we said, trav- 
elled over so strange a country, and we now expect his 



808 Spinoza. 

'conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct 
his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and last- 
ing felicity, and, by a comparison of his powers with the 
objects offered to them, to ascertain how far they are capa- 
ble of arriving at these objects, and by what means they 
can best be trained towards them — is the aim which Spi- 
noza assigns to philosophy. '' Most people," he adds, " de- 
ride or vilify their nature ; it is a better thing to endeavor 
to understand it ; and however extravagant my proceeding 
may be thought, I propose to analyze the properties of that 
nature as if it were a mathematical figure." Mind being, 
as he conceives himself to have shown, nothing else than 
the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body, we 
are not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply 
and merely as an act. There is no general power called 
intellect, any more than there is any general abstract voli- 
tion, but only hie et ille intellectus et hcec et ilia volitio. 

Again, by the word " Mind " is understood not merely an 
act or acts of will or intellect, but all forms also of con- 
sciousness of sensation or emotion. The human body being 
composed of many small bodies, the mind is similarly com- 
posed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind 
depends on the relation which the component portions 
maintain towards each other. This is obviously the case 
w^ith body ; and if we can translate metaphysics into com- 
mon experience, it is equally the case with mind. There 
are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect ; a thou- 
sand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental 
comi^osition ; and since one contradicts another, and each 
has a tendency to become dominant, it is only in the har- 
monious equipoise of their several activities, in their due 
and just subordination, that any unity of action or consist- 
ency of feeling is possible. After a masterly analysis of 
all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has 
ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives 
at the principles under which unity and consistency can be 



Spinoza, 309 

obtained as the condition upon which a being so composed* 
can look for any sort of happiness ; and these principles, 
arrived at as they are by a route so different, are the same, 
and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same, as those 
of the Christian reh'onion. 

It might seem impossible in a system which binds to- 
gether in so inexorable a sequence the relations of cause 
and effect, to make a place for the action of self-control ; 
but consideration will show that, however vast the differ- 
ence between those who deny and those who affirm the 
liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is 
usually understood), it is not a difference which affects the 
conduct or alters the practical bearings of it. Conduct 
may be determined by laws — laws as absolute as those 
of matter ; and yet the one as well as the other may be 
brought under control by a proper understanding of those 
laws. Now, experience seems plainly to say, that while all 
our actions arise out of desire, — that whatever we do, we 
do for the sake of something which we msh to be or to 
obtain, — we are differently affected towards what is pro- 
posed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we 
understand the nature of such object in itself and in its 
consequences. The better we know, the better we act; 
and the fallacy of all common arguments against necessi- 
tarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room for 
self-direction : it merely insists, in exact conformity with 
experience, on the conditions under which self-determina- 
tion is possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, 
depends on knowledge. Let a man certainly know that 
there is poison in the cup of wine before him, and he will 
not drink it. By the law of cause and effect, his desire for 
the wine is overcome by the fear of the pain or the death 
which will follow. So with every thing which comes before 
him. Let the consequences of any action be clear, defi- 
nite, and inevitable, and though Spinoza would not say that 
the knowledge of them will be absolutely sufficient to de- 



810 Spinoza, 

termine the conduct (because the clearest knowledge may 
be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the best which 
we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot do all. 

On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various tend- 
encies of human nature, called commonly the passions 
and affections, he returns upon the nature of our ordinary 
knowledge to derive out of it the means for their sulx)rdi- 
nation. All these tendencies of themselves seek their own 
objects — seek them blindly and immoderately ; and the 
mistakes and the unhappinesses of life arise from the want 
of due understanding of these objects, and a just modera- 
tion of the desire for them. His analysis is remarkably 
clear, but it is too long for us to enter upon it ; the impor- 
tant thing being the character of the control which is to be 
exerted. To arrive at this, he employs a distinction of 
great practical utility, and which is peculiarly his own. 

Following his tripartite division of knowledge, he finds 
all kinds of it arrange themselves under one of two classes, 
and to be either adequate or inadequate. By adequate 
knowledge he does not mean what is exhaustive and com- 
plete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused : 
by inadequate, he means what we know merely as fact 
either derived from our own sensations, or from the author- 
ity of others, while of the connection of it with other facts, 
of the causes, effects, or meaning of it we know nothing. 
We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we are 
unacquainted with all the properties which belong to it ; 
we conceive it distinctly as a figure generated by the rota- 
tion of a line, one end of which is stationary. Phenomena, 
on the other hand, however made known to us, — phenom- 
ena of the senses, and phenomena of experience, as long 
as they remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any 
higher relation, — we can never know except as inade- 
quately. We cannot tell .what outward things are by com- 
ing in contact with certain features of them. We have a 
very imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and 



Spinoza. 311 

the sensations which we experience of various kinds rather 
indicate to us the nature of these bodies themselves than 
of the objects which affect them. Now, it is obvious that 
the greater part of mankind act only upon knowledge of 
this latter kind. The amusements, even the active pur- 
suits, of most of us remain wholly within the range of 
uncertainty, and, therefore, are full of hazard and precari- 
ousness : little or nothing issues as we expect. We look 
for pleasure and we find pain ; we shun one pain and find a 
greater ; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we 
so complain of in life — the disappointments, failures, mor- 
tifications which form the material of so nmch moral medi- 
tation on the vanity of the world. Much of all this is inevi- 
table from the constitution of oiu' nature. The mind is too 
infirm to be entirely occupied with higher knowledge. The 
conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which can- 
not be understood by us except with the utmost inadequacy ; 
and the resignation to the higher will which has determined 
all things in the wisest way, is imperfect in the best of us. 
Yet much is possible, if not all ; and, although through a 
large tract of life " there comes one event to all, to the wise 
and to the unwise," " yet wisdom excelleth folly as far as 
light excelleth darkness." The phenomena of experience, 
after inductive experiment, and just and careful considera- 
tion, arrange themselves under laws uniform in their opera- 
tion, and furnishing a guide to the judgment ; and over all 
things, although the interval must remain unexplored for- 
ever, because what we would search into is infinite, may 
l^e seen the beginning of all things, the absolute, eternal 
God. " Mens humana," Spinoza continues, " quaedam agit, 
quaedam vero patitur." In so far as it is influenced by in- 
adequate ideas — " eatenus patitur " — it is passive and in 
bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice : in so far as 
its ideas are adequate — " eatenus agit " — it is active, it is 
itself While we are governed by outward temptations, by 
the casual pleasures, by the fortunes or the misfortunes of 



312 Spinoza, 

life, we are but instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted 
upon as the animal is acted on by its appetites, or the inan- 
imate matter by the laws which bind it ; we are slaves — 
instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the order 
of Nature, but in ourselves nothing ; instruments which are 
employed for a special work, and which are consumed in 
effecting it. So far, on the contrary, as we know clearly 
what we do, as we understand what we are, and direct our 
conduct not by the passing emotion of the moment, but by 
a grave, clear, and constant knowledge of what is really 
good, so far we are said to act, — we are ourselves the 
spring of our own activity, — we pursue the genuine well- 
being of our entire nature, and that we can always find, 
and it never disappoints us when found. 

All things desire life ; all things seek for energy and 
fuller and ampler being. The component parts of man, his 
various appetites and passions, are seeking larger activity 
while pursuing each its immoderate indulgence ; and it is 
the primary law of every single being that it so follows 
what will give it increased vitality. Whatever will con- 
tribute to such increase is the proper good of each ; and 
the good of man as a united being is measured and deter- 
mined by the effect of it upon his collective powers. The 
appetites gather power from their several objects of desire ; 
but the power of the part is the weakness of the whole ; 
and man as a collective person gathers life, being, and self- 
mastery only from the absolute good, — the source of all 
real good, and truth, and energy, — that is, God. The 
love of God is the extinction of ail other loves and all 
other desires. To know God, as far as man can know him, 
is power, self-government, and peace. And this is virtue, 
and this is blessedness. 

Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are 
brought round to the old conclusions of theology ; and 
Spinoza protests that it is no new doctrine which he is 
teaching, but that it is one which in various dialects has 



Spinoza, 313 

been believed from the beginning of the world. Happi- 
ness depends on tlie consistency and coherency of charac- 
ter, and that coherency can only be given by the knowledge 
of the One Being, to know whom is to know all things ade- 
quately, and to love whom is to have conquered every other 
inclination. The more entirely our minds rest on Him — 
the more distinctly we regard all things in their relation 
to Him, the more we cease to be under the dominion of 
external things ; we surrender ourselves consciously to do 
his will, and as living men and not as passive things we 
becom^e the instruments of his power. When the true na- 
ture and true causes of our affections become clear to us, 
they have no more power to influence us. The more we 
understand, the less can feeling sway us ; we know that all 
things are what they are, because they are so constituted 
that they could not be otherwise, and we cease to be an- 
gry with our brother, because he disappoints us ; we shall 
not fret at calamity, nor complain of fortune, because no 
such thing as fortune exists ; and if we fail it is better 
than if we had succeeded, not perhaps for ourselves, yet 
for the universe. We cannot fear when nothing can be- 
fall us except what God will^, and we shall not violently 
hope, when the future, whatever it be, will be the best 
wdiich is possible. Seeing all things in their place in the 
everlasting order. Past and Future will not aflfect us. The 
temptation of present pleasure will not overcome the cer- 
tainty of future pain, for the pain will be as sure as the 
pleasure, and we shall see all things under a rule of ada- 
mant. The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the 
idea of contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of 
their actions ; the wise man will know that each action 
brings with it its inevitable consequences, which even God 
cannot change without ceasing to be himself. 

In such a manner, through all the conditions of life, Spi- 
noza pursues the advantages which will accrue to man from 
the know^ledge of God, God and man being what his phi- 



814 Spinoza, 

losophy has described them. His practical teaching is sin- 
gularly beautiful ; although much of its beauty is perhaps 
due to associations which have arisen out of Christianity, 
and which in the system of Pantheism have no proper abid- 
ing place. Retaining, indeed, all that is beautiful in Chris- 
tianity, he even seems to have relieved himself of the more 
fearful features of the general creed. He acknowledges no 
hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity with 
God ; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings, 
all in their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted 
to them. Doubtless a pleasant exchange and a grateful 
deliverance, if only we could persuade ourselves that a hun- 
dred pages of judiciously arranged demonstrations could 
really and indeed have worked it for us ; if we could in- 
deed believe that we could have the year without its 
winter, day without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil 
is unhappily too real a thing to be so disposed of 

But if v/e cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its 
entire completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the 
disinterestedness and calm nobility which pervade his 
theories of human life and obligation. He will not hear 
of a virtue which desires to be rewarded. Virtue is the 
power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaust- 
ive end of all human desire. " Beatitudo non est virtutis 
pretium, sed ipsa virtus. Nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi 
acquiescentia, qua ex Dei intuitiva cognitione oritur." The 
same spiiit of generosity exhibits itself in all its conclu- 
sions. The ordinary objects of desire, he says, are of such 
a kind that for one man to obtain them is for another to 
lose them ; and this alone would suffice to prove that they 
are not what any man should labor after. But the fullness 
of God suffices for us all ; and he who possesses this good 
desires only to communicate it to every one, and to make 
all mankind as happy as himself. And again : — " The 
wise man will not speak in society of his neighbor's faults, 
and sparingly of the infirmity of human nature ; but he 



Spinoza. 315 

will speak largely of human virtue and human [jower, and 
of the means by which that nature can best be perfected, 
so to lead men to put away that fear and aversion with 
which they look on goodness, and learn with relieved hearts 
to love and desire it." And once more : — " He who loves 
God will not desire that God should love him in return with 
any partial or particular affection, for that is to desire that 
God for his sake should change his everlasting nature and 
become lower than himself" 

One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would 
seem in such a system to be necessarily wanting. Where 
individual action is resolved into the modified activity of 
the Universal Being, all absorbing and all evolving, the in- 
dividuality of the personal man is but an evanescent and 
unreal shadow. Such individuality as we now possess, 
whatever it be, might continue to exist in a future state as 
really as it exists in the present, and those to whom it be- 
longs might be anxious naturally for its persistence. Yet 
it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the idea 
of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed 
into its elements, the soul corresponding to it must accom- 
pany it into an answering dissolution. And this, indeed, 
Spinoza in one sense actually affirms, when he denies to 
the mind any power of retaining consciousness of what 
has befallen it in life, " nisi durante corpore." But Spi- 
nozism is a philosophy full of surprises ; and our calcula- 
tions of what 7nufit belong to it are perpetually baffled. 
The imagination, the memory, the senses, whatever belongs 
to inadequate perception, perish necessarily and eternally ; 
and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations, 
who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession 
of himself, having in life possessed no personality, loses in 
death the appearance of it with the dissolution of the 
body. 

Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the 
essence of the mind, united to the mind as the mind is 



316 Spinoza, 

united to the body, and thus there is in the soul something 
of an everlasting nature which cannot utterly perish. And 
here Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most solemn 
conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his demon- 
strations, and appeals to the consciousness^ In spite of 
our non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in 
spite of all difficulties from the dissolution of the body, 
" Nihilominus," he says, " sentimus experimurque nos aeter- 
nos esse. Nam mens non minus res illas sentit quas in- 
telligendo concipit, quam quas in memoria habet. Mentis 
enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ipsae demon- 
strationes." 

This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls 
into easy harmony with the rest of the system. As the 
mind is not a faculty, but an act or acts, — not a jDOwer of 
perception, but the perception itself, in its high union with 
the highest object (to use the metai3hysical language which 
Coleridge has made popular and partially intelligible), the 
object and the subject become one. If knowledge be fol- 
lowed as it ought to be followed, and all objects of knowl- 
edge be regarded in their relations to the One Absolute 
Being, the knowledge of particular outward things, of 
Nature, or life, or history, becomes, in fact, knowledge of 
God ; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, 
the more the mind is raised above what is perishable in the 
phenomena to the idea or law which lies beyond them. It 
learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal, not upon the 
temporary ; and being thus occupied with the everlasting 
laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with 
them, it contracts in itself the character of the objects 
which possess it. Thus we are emancipated from the con- 
ditions of duration ; we are liable even to death only quate- 
nus patimur, as we are passive things and not active intel- 
ligences ; and the more we possess such knowledge and 
are possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is super- 
seded by the active — so that at last the human soul may 



Spinoza. 317 

" become of such a nature that the portion of it which will 
perish with the body in comparison with that of it which 
shall endure, shall be insignificant and nullius momentir 
(Eth. V. 38.) 

Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the in- 
fluence of which upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is 
not easy to over-estimate. The account of it is far from 
being an accoimt of the whole of Spinoza's labors ; his 
"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus " was the forerunner of 
German historical criticism ; the whole of which has been 
but the application of principles laid down in that remark- 
able work. But this is not a subject on which, upon the 
present occasion, we have cared to enter. We have de- 
signedly confined ourselves to the system which is most 
associated with the name of its author. Tt is this which 
has been really powerful, which has stolen over the minds 
even of thinkers who imagine themselves most opposed to 
it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism of Schell- 
ing and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder 
and Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has 
formed the strong, shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again 
it has been able to unite with the theories of the most ex- 
treme materialism. 

It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been un- 
mixedly good), at the bottom of that more reverent con- 
templation of Nature which has caused the success of our 
modern landscape painting, which inspired Wordsworth's 
poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become 
an instrument of intellectual education, must first be in- 
fused into the lessons of Nature ; the sense of that " some- 
thing " interfused in the material world, — 

" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sk}', and in the mind of man ; — 
A motion and a spirit, which impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 



318 Spinoza. 

If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with 
Spinoza, as an actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are 
unable to rest in the mere denial that it is this. We go on 
to ask what it is, and we are obliged to conclude thus much 
at least of it, that every smallest being was once a thought 
in his mind ; and in the study of what He has made, we are 
really and truly studying a revelation of himself. 

It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on 
the moral side, that the stumbling-block is lying ; in that 
excuse for evil and for evil men which the necessitarian 
theory will furnish, disguise it in what fair-sounding words 
we will. So plain this is, that common-sense people, and 
especially English people, cannot bring themselves even to 
consider the question without impatience, and turn dis- 
dainfully and angrily from a theory which confuses their 
instincts of right and wrong. Although, however, error on 
this side is infinitely less mischievous than on the other, 
no vehement error can exist in this world with impunity ; 
and it does appear that in our common view of these 
matters we have closed our eyes to certain grave facts 
of experience, and have given the fatalist a vantage-ground 
of real truth which we ought to have considered and al- 
lowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter briefly 
into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of 
life are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly 
to what they say to us ; and dislike the lesson as we may, 
it is cowardice which refuses to hear it. 

The popular belief is, that right and wrong lie before 
every man, and that he is free to choose between them, and 
the responsibility of choice rests with himself. The fatal- 
ist's belief is that every man's actions are determined by 
causes external and internal over which he has no power, 
leaving no room for any moral choice whatever. The first 
is contradicted by facts, the second by the instinct of con- 
science. Even Spinoza allows that for practical purposes 
we are obliged to regard the future as contingent, and our- 



Spinoza. 319 

selves as able to influence it ; and it is incredible that both 
our inward convictions and our outward conduct should be 
built together upon a falsehood. But if, as Butler says, 
whatever be the speculative account of the matter, we are 
practically forced to regard ourselves as free, this is but 
half the truth, for it may be equally said that practically 
we are forced to regard each other as not free ; and to 
make allowance, every moment, for influences for which we 
cannot hold each other personally responsible. If not, — 
if every person of sound mind (in the common acceptation 
of the term) be equally able at all times to act right if 
only he will, — why all the care which we take of children ? 
why the pains to keep them from bad society ? why do we 
so anxiously watch their disposition, to determine the edu- 
cation which will best answer to it? Why in cases of 
guilt do we vary our moral censure according to the oppor- 
tunities of the offender ? Why do we find excuses for 
youth, for inexperience, for violent natural passion, for bad 
education, bad example ? Why, except that we feel 
that all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty 
person, and that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard 
them ? But what we act upon in private life we cannot 
acknowledge in our ethical theories, and while our conduct 
in detail is humane and just, we have been contented to 
gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and 
coarse generalizations of political necessity. In the swift 
haste of social life we must indeed treat men as we find 
them. We have no time to make allowances ; and the 
graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a mere 
impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye though 
he has been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. 
Giles's ; and definite penalties must be attached to definite 
acts, the conditions of political life not admitting of any 
other method of dealing with them. But it is absurd to 
argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by 
whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability. The act 



320 Spinoza, 

is one thing, the moral guilt is another. There are many 
cases in which, as Butler again allows, if we trace a sin- 
ner's history to the bottom, the guilt attributable to himself 
appears to vanish altogether. 

This is plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue 
to deny or ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, 
but men who love the truth as much as ourselves) who will 
see only what we neglect, and will insist upon it, and build 
their systems upon it. 

And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those 
natural tendencies which each of us brings with him into 
the world, — which we did not make, and yet which almost 
as much determine what we are to be, as the properties of 
the seed determine the tree which shall grow from it. Men 
are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or gen- 
erous, or affectionate ; there is as large difference in their 
dispositions as in the features of their faces. Duties which 
are easy to one, another finds difficult or impossible. It is 
with morals as it is with art. Two children are taught to 
draw ; one learns with ease, the other hardly or never. In 
vain the master will show him what to do. It seems so 
easy : it seems as if he had only to loill, and the thing 
would be done ; but it is not so. Between the desire and 
the execution lies the incapable organ which only wearily, 
and after long labor, imperfectly accomplishes what is re- 
quired of it. And the same, to a cevtain extent, unless we 
w^ill deny the patent facts of experience, holds true in moral 
actions. No wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside 
as these things are in the popular beliefs, as soon as they 
are recognized in their full reality they should be mistaken 
for the whole truth, and the free-will theory be thrown 
aside as a chimera. 

It may be said, and it often is said, that such reasonings 
are merely sophistical — that however we entangle our- 
selves in logic, we are conscious that we are free ; we know 
— we are as sure as we are of our existence — that we 



Spinoza, 321 

have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we 
choose. But this is less plain than it seems ; and if granted, 
it proves less than it appears to prove. It may be true that 
we can act as we choose, but can we choose ? Is not our 
choice determined for us ? We cannot determine from the 
fact, because we always have chosen as soon as we act, and 
we cannot replace the conditions in such a way as to dis- 
cover whether we could have chosen any thing else. The 
stronger motive may have determined our volition without 
our perceiving it ; and if we desire to prove our independ- 
ence of motive, by showing that we can choose something 
different from that which we should naturally have chosen, 
we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire be- 
coming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a motive. Again, 
consciousness of the possession of any power may easily be 
delusive ; we can properly judge what our powers are only 
by what they have actually accomplished ; we know what 
we have done, and we may infer from having done it that 
our power was equal to what it achieved. But it is easy 
for us to overrate our strength if we try to measure our 
abilities in themselves. A man who can leap five yards 
may think that he can leap six ; yet he may try and fail. 
A man who can write prose may only learn that he cannot 
write poetry from the badness of the verses which he pro- 
duces. To the appeal to consciousness of power there is 
always an ans\ver : — that we may believe ourselves to 
possess it, but that experience proves that we may be de- 
ceived. 

There is, however, another group of feelings which can- 
not be set aside in this way, which do prove that, in some 
sense or other, in some degree or other, we are the authors 
of our own actions. It is one of the clearest of all in- 
ward phenomena, that, where two or more courses involv- 
ing moral issues are before us, whether we have a con- 
sciousness of power to choose between them or not, we 
have a consciousness that we ought to choose between 
21 



322 Spinoza. 

them ; a sense of duty — on Zd tovto Trpdrreiv — as Aris- 
totle expresses it, which we cannot shake off. Whatever 
this consciousness involves (and some measure of freedom 
it must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within 
us, and refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic. It 
is not that of the two courses we know that one is in the 
long run the best, and the other more immediately tempt- 
ing. We have a sense of obligation irrespective of con- 
sequence, the violation of which is followed again by a 
sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In 
vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as 
they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mistakes 
arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts 
of sensation, most vivid in minds of most vigorous sen- 
sibility ; and although they may be extinguished by habitual 
profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the 
paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not 
a real power of perceiving real things, than blindness is 
a proof that sight is not a real power. The perceptions 
of worth and worthlessness are not conclusions of reason- 
ing, but immediate sensations like those of seeing and 
hearing ; and although, like the other senses, they may be 
mistaken sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the 
fact of the existence of such feelings at all proves that 
there is something which corresponds to them. If there 
be any such things as " true ideas," or clear, distinct per- 
ceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, 
and according to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what 
it involves. And it involves that somewhere or other the 
influence of causes ceases to operate, and that some degree 
of power there is in men of self-determination, by the 
amount of which, and not by their specific actions, moral 
merit or demerit is to be measured. Speculative diffi- 
culties remain in abundance. It will be said in a case, e. g, 
of moral trial, that there may have been power ; but was 
there 'power enough to resist the temptation ? If there 



Spinoza. 323 

,vas, then it was resisted. If there was not, there was 
not responsibility. We must answer again from prac- 
tical instinct. We refuse to allow men to be considered 
all equally guilty who have committed the same faults ; 
and we insist that their actions must be measured against 
their opportunities. But a similar conviction assures us 
that there is somewhere a point of freedom. Where 
that point is — where other influences terminate, and 
responsibility begins — will always be of intricate and 
often impossible solution. But if there be such a point 
at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and man is what 
he has been hitherto supposed to be — an exception in 
the order of Nature, with a power not differing in de- 
gree but differing in kind from those of other creatures. 
Moral life, like all life, is a mystery ; and as to anatom- 
ize the body will not reveal the secret of animation, so 
with the actions of the moral man. The spiritual life, 
which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away 
before the logical dissecting knife, and leaves it but a 
corpse to work upon. 



THE DISSOLUTION OP THE MONASTERIES. 



To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not 
difficult — it is impossible. Even what is passing in our 
presence we see but through a glass darkly. The mind 
as well as the eye adds something of its own, before an 
image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it. 

And in historical inquiries, the most instructed think- 
ers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. 
Those who know the most, approach least to agreement. 
The most careful investigations are diverging roads — the 
further men travel upon them, the greater the interval by 
which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the 
history of the Saxon Princes is " the scuffling of kites and 
crows." Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a 
degenerate England by pointing to the sixty saints and 
the hundred confessors who were trained in her royal 
palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a 
chasm yawns between these two conceptions of the same 
era! Through what common term can the student pass 
from one into the other ? 

Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The his- 
tory of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before 
the Revolution of the seventeenth century. To Lord 
John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome from 
centuries of folly and ferocity ; and Mr. Hallam's more 
temperate language softens, without concealing, a similar 
conclusion. These writers have all studied what they de- 
scribe. Mr. Carlyle has studied tlie same subject with 

1 From Frasei-'s Magazine, 1857. 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 325 

power at least equal to theirs, and to him the greatness of 
English character was waning with the dawn of English 
literature ; the race of heroes was already failing. The 
era of action was yielding before the era of speech. 

All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated ; we 
may liave settled into some moderate via media^ or have 
carved out our own ground on an original pattern ; but if 
we are wise, the differences in other men's judgments will 
teach us to be diffident. The more distinctly we have 
made history bear witness in favor of our particular opin- 
ions, the more we have multiplied the chances against the 
truth of our own theory. 

Again, supposing that we have made a truce with " opin- 
ions," properly so called ; supposing we have satisfied our- 
selves that it is idle to quarrel upon points on which good 
men differ, and that it is better to attend rather to what we 
certainly know ; supposing that, either from superior wis- 
dom, or from the conceit of superior wisdom, we have re- 
solved that we will look for human perfection neither 
exclusively in the Old World nor exclusively in the New — 
neither amonsj Catholics nor Protestants, amono- Whiors or 
Tories, heathens or Christians — that we have laid aside 
accidental differences, and determined to recognize only 
moral distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral 
evil, wherever we find them ; — even supposing all this, we 
have not much improved our position — we cannot leap 
from our shadow. 

Eras, hke individuals, differ from one another in the 
species of virtue which they encourage. In one age, we 
find the virtues of the warrior ; in the next, of the saint. 
The ascetic and the soldier in their turn disappear ; an in- 
dustrial era succeeds, bringing with it the virtues of com- 
mon sense, of grace, and refinement. There is the virtue 
of energy and command, there is the virtue of humility 
and patient suffering. All these are different, and all are, 
or maybe, of equal moral value ; yet from the constitution 



326 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

of our minds, we are so framed that we cannot equally ap- 
preciate all ; we sympathize instinctively with the person 
who most represents our own ideal — with the period when 
the graces which most harmonize with our own tempers 
have been especially cultivated. Further, if we leave out 
of sight these refinements, and content ourselves with the 
most jDopular conceptions of morality, there is this immeas- 
urable difficulty, — so great, yet so little considered, — that 
goodness is positive as well as negative, and consists in the 
active accomplishment of certain things which we are 
bound to do, as well as in the abstaining from things which 
we are bound not to do. And here the warp and woof 
vary in shade and pattern. Many a man, with the help of 
circumstances, may pick his way clear through life, never 
having violated one prohibitive commandment, and yet at 
last be fit only for the place of the unprofitable servant — 
he may not have committed either sin or crime, yet never 
have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish emotion. 
Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impul- 
sive nature into fault after fault — shall have been reckless, 
improvident, perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for 
the kingdom of heaven than the Pharisee — fitter, because 
against the catalogue of faults there could perhaps be set 
a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and self-for- 
getfulness — fitter, because to those who love much, much 
is forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, be- 
hind his decent coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would 
have been enough to have colored him in and out alike in 
the steady hues of selfishness, afraid of offending the 
upper powers as he was afraid of offending Allworthy — 
not from any love for what was good, but solely because it 
would be imprudent — because the pleasure to be gained 
was not worth the risk of consequences. Such a Blifil 
would have answered the novelist's purpose — for he would 
have remained a worse man in the estimation of some of 
us than Tom Jones. 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 327 

So the truth is ; but unfortunately it is only where accu- 
rate knowledge is stimulated by affection, that we are able 
to feel it. Persons who live beyond our own circle, and, 
still more, persons who have lived in another age, receive 
what is called justice, not charity ; and justice is supposed to 
consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of 
misconduct, leaving merit unrecognized. There are many 
reasons for this harsh method of judging. We must de- 
cide of men by what we know, and it is easier to know 
fixults than to know virtues. Faults are specific, easily de- 
scribed, easily appreciated, easily remembered. And again 
there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue ; but no one pretends 
to vice who is not vicious. The bad things which can be 
proved of a man we know to be genuine. He was a spend- 
thrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he equivocated. 
These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they 
stand alone, tinge the whole character. 

This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All 
men feel a necessity of being on some terms with their 
conscience, at their own expense or at another's. If they 
cannot part with their faults, they will at least call them by 
their right name when they meet with such faults else- 
where ; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of vio- 
lence or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, 
of great and extensive suffering, or any of those other mis- 
fortunes which the selfishness of men has at various times 
occasioned, they will vituperate the doers of such things, 
and the age which has permitted them to be done, with the 
full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time 
they are themselves doing things which will be described, 
with no less justice, in the same color, by an equally vir- 
tuous posterity. 

Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings 
of the poor in the days of serfdom and villanage ; yet the 
records of the strikes of the last ten years, when told by 
the sufferers, contain pictures no less fertile in tragedy. 



328 The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 

We speak of famines and plagues under the Tiidors and 
vStuarts ; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, 
the last page of such horrors which has yet been turned 
over, is the most horrible of all. . We can conceive a de- 
scription of England during the year which has just closed 
over us (1856), true in all its details, containing no one 
statement which can be challenged, no singrle exagoreration 
which can be proved ; and this descrii^tion, if given with- 
out the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel 
why the Cities of the Plain were destroyed, and England 
was allowed to survive. The frauds of trusted men, high 
in power and high in supposed religion ; the wholesale poi- 
sonings ; the robberies ; the adulteration of food — nay, of 
almost every thing exposed for sale — the cruel usage of 
women — children murdered for the burial fees — life and 
property insecure in open day in the open streets — splen- 
dor such as the world never saw before upon earth, with 
vice and squalor crouching under its walls — let all this be 
written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereaf- 
ter by the investigation of a posterity which desires to 
judge us as we generally have judged our forefathers, and 
few years will show darker in the English annals than the 
year which we have just left behind us. Yet we know, in 
the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would 
be. Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find 
one, may not be able to disprove a single article in the in- 
dictment ; and yet we know that, as the world goes, he will 
be right if he marks the year with a white stroke — as one 
in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than 
an average. 

Once more : our knowledge of any man is always inade- 
quate — even of the unit which each of us calls himself; 
and the first condition under which we can know a man at 
all is, that he be in essentials something like ourselves; 
that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open 
the secrets of his experience ; and it often happens, even 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 329 

among our contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. 
The Englishman and the Italian may understand each 
other's speech, but the language of each other's ideas has 
still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have risen 
from a radical incongruity of character which has divided 
the Celt from the Saxon. And again, in the same country 
the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the 
Protestant to the Catholic. Their intellects have been 
shaped in opposite moulds ; they are like instruments 
which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but 
in a far higher degree, we are divided from the generations 
which have preceded us on this planet — we try to com- 
l^rehend a Pericles or a Caesar — an image rises before us 
which we seem to recognize as belonging to our common 
humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to us — 
and this — and this. We are full of hope ; the lineaments, 
one by one, pass into clearness ; when suddenly the figure 
becomes enveloped in a cloud — some perplexity crosses 
our analysis, baffling it utterly ; the phantom which we have 
evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully mocking our 
incapacity to master it. 

The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer 
to us than Greeks or Romans ; and yet there is a large 
interval between the baron who fought at Barnet field, and 
his polished descendaat in a modern drawing-room. The 
scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment — the habits, 
the hopes, the fears, the emotions — have utterly changed. 

In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been 
struck with dumb wonder at the facility with which men 
will fill in chasms in their information with conjecture ; 
will guess at the motives which have prompted actions ; 
will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the past lay 
out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to say 
for himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to 
discover authentic explanations of English historical diffl- 
culties, it is rare indeed that he has found any conjecture. 



330 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

either of his own or of any other modern writer, confirmed. 
The true motive has ahiiost invariably been of a kind 
which no modern experience could have suggested. 

Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an 
expression of opinion on a controverted question. They 
will serve, however, to indicate the limits within which the 
said opinion is supposed to be hazarded. And in fact, 
neither in. this nor in any historical subject is the conclu- 
sion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form. 
The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to 
relate honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications 
of a judicial sentence upon them as may be suggested in 
the form in which the story is arranged. 

Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time 
of their dissolution, were really in that condition of moral 
corruption which is laid to their charge in the Act of Par- 
liament by which they were dissolved, is a point which it 
seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic, and indeed 
almost all English writers who are not committed to an un- 
favorable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doc- 
trines, seem to have agreed of late years that the accusa- 
tions, if not false, were enormously exaggerated. The dis- 
solution, we are told, was a predetermined act of violence 
and rapacity ; and when the reports and the letters of the 
visitors are quoted in justification of the Government, the 
discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavora- 
ble witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious — 
in fact, as a suborned liar. Upon these terms the argu- 
ment is easily disposed of; and if it were not that truth is 
in all matters better than falsehood, it would be idle to 
reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No 
evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived 
at without evidence — and why should we attempt a task 
which it is hopeless to accomphsh ? It seems necessary, 
however, to reassert the actual state of the surviving tes- 
timony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the links 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 331 

of the old traditions ; and the present paper will contain 
one or two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life 
and habits of those institutions, which have been lately 
met with chiefly among the unprinted Records. In antici- 
pation of any possible charge of unfairness in judging 
from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to 
judge — all wish to do any thing beyond relating certain^ 
ascertained stories. Let it remain, to those who are per- 
verse enough to insist upon it, an open question whether 
the monasteries were more corrupt under Henry the 
Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. 
The dissolution would have been equally a necessity ; for 
no reasonable person would desire that bodies of men 
should have been maintained for the only business of sing- 
ing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no longer be- 
lieved. Our present desire is merely this — to satisfy our- 
selves whether the Government, in discharging a duty 
which could not be dispensed with, condescended to false- 
hood in seeking a vindication for themselves which they 
did not require ; or whether they had cause really to be- 
lieve the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they 
affirmed — whether, that is to say, there really were such 
cases either of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, 
or careless waste and prodigality, as to justify the general 
censure which was pronounced against the system by the 
Parliament and the Privy Council. 

Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen 
Mary's agents destroyed the Records of the visitation un- 
der her father, Roman Catholic writers have taken refuge 
in a disdainful denial ; and the Anglicans, who for the 
most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the Refor- 
mation, detest the means by which it was brought about, 
have taken the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, 
when the Report of the visitors of the abbeys was read in 
the Commons House, there rose from all sides one long 
cry of '• Down with them." But Bishop Latimer, in the 



332 The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 

opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we 
produce letters of the visitors themselves, we are told that 
they are the slanders prepared to justify a preconceived 
purpose of spoliation. No witness, it seems, will be admit- 
ted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless some 
enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the 
crimes which made the Reformation necessary, the crimes 
themselves are to be regarded as unproved. This is a 
hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey. Wolsey com- 
menced the suppression. Wolsey first made public the 
infamies which disgraced the Church ; while, notwith- 
standing, he died the devoted servant of the Church. 
This evidence is surely admissible? But no: Wolsey, too, 
must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a 
timeserver. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was 
— in short, we know not what Wolsey was, or what he was 
not. Who can put confidence in a charlatan ? Behind 
the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the 
abbeys may well believe himself secure. 

And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be, 
it happens, after all, that we are able partially to gratify 
them. It is strange that, of all extant accusations against 
any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is from a quarter which 
even Lingard himself would scarcely call suspicious. No 
picture left us by Henry's visitors surpasses, even if it 
equals, a description of the condition of the Abbey of St. 
Albans, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, drawn 
by Morton, Henry the Seventh's minister. Cardinal Arch- 
bishop, Legate of the Apostolic See, in a letter addressed 
by him to the Abbot of St. Albans himself 

We must request our reader's special attention for the 
next two pages. 

In the year 1489, Pope Innocent the Eighth — moved 
with the enormous stories which reached his ear of the 
corruption of the houses of religion in England — granted 
a commission to the Ai'chbishop of Canterbury to make 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 333 

inquiries whether these stories were true, and to proceed 
to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The 
regular clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation, ex- 
cept under especial directions from Rome. The occasion 
had appeared so serious as to make extraordinary inter- 
ference necessary. 

On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal Mor- 
ton, among other letters, wrote the following letter : — 

John by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate 
of all England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to WiUiam, Abbot of 
the Monastery of St. Albans, greeting. 

We have received certain letters under lead, the copies whereof 
we herewith send you, from our most holy Lord and Father in 
Christ, Innocent, by Divine Providence Pope, the eighth of that 
name. We therefore, John, the Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, 
inquisitor, and judge therein mentioned, in reverence for the 
Apostolic See, have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing 
the said commission ; and have determined that we will proceed 
by, and according to, the full force, tenor, and effect of the same. 

And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious 
and brought before us upon the testimony of many witnesses 
worthy of credit, that you, the abbot aforementioned, have been 
of long time noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of 
simony, of usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues, 
and possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enor- 
mous crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, 
and administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said 
monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that 
whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed 
by the pious devotion of illustrious princes, of famous memory, 
heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our 
most serene Lord and King that now is, in order that true religion 
might flourish there, that the name of the Most High, in whose 
honor and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated 
there ; 

And whereas, in days heretofore, the regular observance of the 
said rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality was diligently 
kept; 

Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you have pre- 



334 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

sided in the same monastery, you and certain of your fellow-monks 
and brethren (whose blood, it is feared, through your neglect, a 
severe Judge will require at your hand) have relaxed the measure 
and form of religious life ; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke 
of contemplation, and all regular observances — hospitality, alms, 
and those other offices of piety which of old time were exercised 
and ministered therein have decreased, and by your faults, your 
carelessness, your neglect and deed, do daily decrease more and 
more, and cease to be regarded — the pious vows of the founders 
are defrauded of their just intent — the ancient rule of your 
order is deserted ; and not a few of your fellow-monks and breth- 
ren, as we most deeply grieve to learn, giving themselves over to 
a reprobate mind, laying aside the fear of God, do lead only a 
life of lasciviousness — nay, as is horrible to relate, be not afraid 
to defile the holy places, even the very churches of God, by in- 
famous intercourse with nuns, &c., &c. 

You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities and 
abominable crimes whereof you are guilty, and for which you are 
noted and diffamed, have, in the first place, admitted a certain 
married woman, named Elena Germyn, who has separated her- 
self without just cause from her husband, and for some time past 
has lived in adultery with another man, to be a nun or sister in 
the house or Priory of Bray, lying, as you pretend, within your 
jurisdiction. You have next appointed the same woman to be 
prioress of the said house, notwithstanding that her said husband 
was living at the time, and is still alive. And finally, Father 
Thomas Sudbury, one of your brother monks, publicly, notori- 
ously, and without interference or punishment from you, has 
associated, and still associates, with this woman as an adulterer 
with his harlot. 

Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow-monks have 
resorted, and do resort, continually to her and other women at 
the same place, as to a public brothel or receiving-house, and 
have received no correction therefor. 

Nor is Bray the only house into which you have introduced dis- 
order. At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be 
under your jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors 
again and again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as 
at Bray, you depose those who are good and religious ; you pro- 
mote to the highest dignities the worthless and the vicious. The 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 335 

duties of the order are cast aside ; virtue is neglected ; and by 
these means so much cost and extravagance has been caused, that 
to provide means for your indulgence you have introduced certain 
of your brethren to preside in their houses under the name of 
guardians, when in fact they are no guardians, but thieves and 
notorious villains ; and with their help you have caused and per- 
mitted the goods of the same priories to be dispensed, or to speak 
more truly to be dissipated, in the above-described corruptions 
and other enormous and accursed offenses. Those places once 
religious are rendered and reputed as it were profane and impi- 
ous ; and by your own and your creatures' conduct, are so impov- 
erished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin. 

In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other cells of 
monks, which you say are subject to you, even within the monas- 
tery of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilap- 
idated the common property; you have made away with the 
jewels ; the copses, the woods, the underwood, almost all the 
oaks, and other forest trees, to the value of eight thousand marks 
and more, you have made to be cut down without distinction, and 
they have by you been sold and alienated. The brethren of the 
abbey, some of whom, as is reported, are given over to all the 
evil things of the world, neglect the service of God altogether. 
They live with harlots and mistresses publicly and continuously, 
within the precincts of the monastery and without. Some of 
them, who are covetous of honor and promotion, and desirous 
therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made away 
with the chalices and other jewels of the Church. They have 
even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very 
shrine of St. Alban ; and you have not punished these men, but 
have rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any 
of your brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise 
and virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred 
. . . You . . . 

But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming 
document. It pursues its way through mire and filth to its 
most lame and impotent conclusion. After all this, the 
abbot was not deposed ; he was invited merely to recon- 
sider his doings, and, if possible, amend them. Such was 
Church discipline, even under an extraordinary commis- 



336 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

sion from Rome. But the most incorrigible Anglican will 
scarcely question the truth of a picture drawn by such a 
hand ; and it must be added that this one unexceptionable 
indictment lends at once assured credibility to the reports 
which were presented fifty years later, on the general visit- 
ation. There is no longer room for the presumptive ob- 
jection that charges so revolting could not be true. We 
see that in their worst form they could be true, and the 
evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and Bedyll, as it 
remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in 
detail, or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot 
dream that Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was mis- 
led by false information. St. Albans was no obscure priory 
in a remote and thinly peopled county. The Abbot of St. 
Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of bish- 
ops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles 
of London. The archbishop had ample means of ascer- 
taining the truth ; and, we may be sure, had taken care to 
examine his ground before he left on record so tremendous 
an accusation. This story is true — as true as it is pite- 
ous. We will pause a moment over it before we pass from 
this, once more to ask our passionate Church ft-iends 
whether still they will persist that the abbeys were no 
worse under the Tudors than they had been in their origin, 
under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and Plantag- 
enet kings. We refuse to believe it. The abbeys which 
towered in the midst of the English towns, the houses clus- 
tered at their feet like subjects round some majestic queen, 
were images indeed of the civil supremacy which the 
Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself; but 
they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which 
had won the homage of grateful and admiring nations. 
The heavenly graces had once descended upon the monas- 
tic orders, making them ministers of mercy, patterns of 
celestial life, breathing witnesses of the power of the Spirit 
in renewing and sanctifying the heart. And then it was 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 337 

that art and wealth and genius poured out their treasures 
to raise fitting tabernacles for the dwelling of so divine a 
soul. Alike in the village and the city, amongst the una- 
dorned walls and lowly roofs which closed in the humble 
dwellings of the laity, the majestic houses of the Father of 
mankind and of his especial servants rose up in sovereign 
beauty. And ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring 
out relief from a never-failing store to the poor and the 
suffering ; ever within the sacred aisles the voices of holy 
men were pealing heavenwards in intercession for the sins 
of mankind ; and such blessed influences were thought to 
exhale around those mysterious precincts, that even the 
poor outcasts of society — the debtor, the felon, and the 
outlaw — gathered round the walls as the sick men sought 
the shadow of the Apostle, and lay there sheltered from the 
avenging hand, till their sins were washed from off their 
souls. The abbeys of the Middle Ages floated through 
the storms of war and conquest, like the ark upon the 
waves of the flood : in the midst of violence remaining invi- 
olate, through the awful reverence which surrounded them. 
The abbeys, as Henry's visitors found them, were as little 
like what they once had been as the living man in the 
pride of his growth is like the corpse which the earth 
makes haste to hide forever. 

The official letters which reveal the condition into which 
the monastic establishments had degenerated, are chiefly 
in the Cotton Library, and a large number of them have 
been published by the Camden Society. Besides these, 
however, there are in the Rolls House many other docu- 
ments which confirm and complete the statements of the 
writers of those letters. There is a part of what seems to 
have been a digest of the " Black Book " — an epitome of 
iniquities, under the title of the " Compendium Comperto- 
rum." There are also reports from private persons, private 
entreaties for inquiry, depositions of monks in official ex- 
aminations, and other similar papers, which, in many in- 
22 



338 The Dissolution of the Monasterie,s. 

stances, are too offensive to be produced, and may rest in 
obscurity, unless contentious persons compel us to bring 
them forward. Some of these, however, throw curious 
light on the habits of the time, and on the collateral disor- 
ders which accompanied the more gross enormities. They 
show us, too, that although the dark tints predominate, the 
picture was not wholly black ;' that as just Lot was in the 
midst of Sodom, yet Avas unable by his single presence to 
save the guilty city from destruction, so in the latest era of 
monasticism there were types yet lingering of an older and 
fairer age, who, nevertheless, were not delivered, like the 
patriarch, but perished most of them with the institution 
to which they belonged. The hideous exposure is not un- 
tinted with fairer lines ; and we see traits here and there 
of true devotion, mistaken but heroic. 

Of these documents two specimens shall be given in this 
place, one of either kind ; and both, so far as we know, 
new to modern history. The first is so singular, that we 
print it as it is found — a genuine antique, fished up, in 
perfect preservation, out of the wreck of the old world. 

About eight miles from Ludlow, in the county of Here- 
fordshire, once stood the Abbey of Wigmore. There was 
Wigmore Castle, a stronghold of the Welsh Marches, now, 
we believe, a modern, well-conditioned mansion ; and Wig- 
more Abbey, of which we do not hear that there are any 
remaining traces. Though now vanished, however, like so 
many of its kind, the house was three hundred years ago 
in vigorous existence ; and when the stir commenced for 
an inquiry, the proceedings of the abbot of this place gave 
occasion to a memorial which stands in the Rolls collec- 
tion as follows : — ^ 

Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot of the Mon- 
astery of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford, to be exhibited to 
the Right Honorable Lord Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy 
Seal and Vicegerent to the King's Majesty. 

1 Rolls House MS., Miscellaneous Papers, First Series. 356. 



The Dissolutio7i of the Monasteries. Co9 

1. The said abbot is to be accused of simony, as well for taking 
money for advocation and putations of benefices, as for giving of 
orders, or more truly, selling them, and that to such persons which 
have been rejected elsewhere, and of little learning and light con- 
sideration. 

2. The said abbot hath promoted to orders many scholars when 
all other bishops did refrain to give such orders on account of cer- 
tain ordinances devised by the King's Majesty and his Council for 
the common weal of this realm. Then resorted to the said abbot 
scholars out of all parts, whom he would promote to orders by 
sixty at a time, and sometimes more, and otherwhiles less. And 
sometimes the said abbot would give orders by night within his 
chamber, and otherwise in the church early in the morning, and 
now and then at a chapel out of the abbey. So that there be 
many unlearned and light priests made by the said abbot; and in 
the diocese of Llandaflf, and in the places aforenamed — a thou- 
sand, as it is esteemed, by the space of this seven years he hath 
made priests, and received not so little money of them as a thou- 
sand pounds for their orders. 

3. Item, that the said abbot now of late, when he could not be 
suffered to give general orders, for the most part doth give orders 
by pretense of dispensation ; and by that color he promoteth 
them to orders by two and three, and takes much money of them, 
both for their orders and for to purchase their dispensations after 
the time he hath promoted them to their orders. 

4. Item, the said abbot hath hurt and dismayed his tenants by 
putting them from their leases, and by inclosing their commons 
from them, and selling and utter wasting of the woods that were 
wont to relieve and succor them. 

5. Item, the said abbot hath sold corradyes, to the damage of 
the said monastery. 

6. Item, the said abbot hath alienate and sold the jewels and 
plate of the monastery, to the value of five hundred marks, to 
jmrcJiase of the Bishop of Rome his hulls to be a bishop, and to 
annex the said abbey to his bishopric, to that intent that he should 
not for his misdeeds be punished, or deprived from his said abbey. 

7. Item, that the said abbot, long after that other bishops had 
renounced the Bishop of Rome, and professed them to the King's 
Majesty, did use, but more verily usurped, the office of a bishop 
by virtue of his first bulls purchased from Rome, till now of late, 
as it will appear by the date of his confirmation, if he have any. 



340 The Dissolution of the Moiiastei^ies. 

8. Item, that he the said abbot hath lived viciously, and kept to 
concubines divers and many women that is openly known. 

9. Item, that the said abbot doth yet continue his vicious living, 
as it is known, openly. 

10. Item, that the said abbot hath spent and wasted much of 
the goods of the said monastery upon the foresaid women. 

11. Item, that the said abbot is mahcious and very wrathful, not 
regarding what he saith or doeth in his fury or anger. 

12. Item, that one Richard Gyles bought of the abbot and con- 
vent of Wigmore a corradye, and a chamber for him and his wife 
for term of their lives ; and when the said Richard Gyles was 
aged and was very weak, he disposed his goods, and made execu- 
tors to execute his will. And when the said abbot now being 

perceived that the said Richard Gyles was rich, and had not 

bequested so much of his goods to him as he would have had, the 
said abbot then came to the chamber of the said Richard Gyles, 
and put out thence all his friends and kinsfolk that.kept him in his 
sickness ; and then the said abbot set his brother and other of his 
servants to keep the sick man ; and the night next coming after 
the said Richard Gyles's coffer was broken, and thence taken all 
that was in the same, to the value of forty marks ; and long after 
the said abbot confessed, before the executors of the said Richard 
Gyles, that it was his deed. 

13. Item, that the said abbot, after he had taken away the 
goods of the said Richard Gyles, used daily to reprove aiid check 
the said Richard Gyles, and inquire of him where was more of his 
coin and money ; and at the last the said abbot thought he lived 
too long, and made the sick man, after much sorry keeping, to be 
taken from his feather-bed, and laid upon a cold mattress, and 
kept his friends from him to his death. 

15. Item, that the said abbot consented to the death and mur- 
dering of one John Tichkill. that was slain at his procuring, at the 
said monastery, by Sir Richard Cubley, canon and chaplain to the 
said abbot ; which canon is and ever hath been since that time 
chief of the said abbot's council ; and is supported to carry cross- 
bowes, and to go whither he lusteth at any time, to fishing and 
hunting in the king's forests, parks, and chases ; but little or 
nothing serving the quire, as other brethren do, neither corrected 
of the abbot for any trespass he doth commit. 

16. Item, that the said abbot hath been perjured oft, as is to be 



The Dissolution of the, 3Io7iasteries. 341 

proved and is proved ; and as it is supposed, did not make a true 
inventory of the goods, chattels, and jewels of his monastery to 
the King's Majesty and his Council. 

17. Item, that the said abbot hath infringed all the king's 
injunctions which were given him by Doctor Cave to observe and 
.keep; and when he was denounced in pleno capitulo to have 
broken the same, he would have put in prison the brother as did 
denounce him to have broken the same injunctions, save that he 
was let by the convent there. 

18. Item, that the said abbot hath openly preached against the 
doctrine of Christ, saying he ought not to love his enemy, but as 
he loves the devil ; and that he should love his enemy's soul, but 
not his body. 

19. Item, that the said abbot hath taken but small regard to 
the good-living of his household. 

20. Item, that the said abbot hath had and hath yet a special 
favor to misdoers and manquellers, thieves, deceivers of their 
neighbors, and ly them [is] most ruled and counseled. 

21. Item,, that the said abbot hath granted leases of farms and 
advocations first to one man, and took his fine, and also hath 
granted the same lease to another man for more money ; and then 
would make to the last taker a lease or writing, with an antedate 
of the first lease, which hath bred great dissension among gen- 
tlemen, — as Master Blunt and Master Moysey, and other takers 
of such leases, — and that often. 

22. Item, the said abbot having the contrepaynes of leases in 
his keeping, hath, for money, rased out the number of years 
mentioned in the said leases, and writ a fresh number in the for- 
mer taker's lease, and in the con 1 repay ne thereof, to the intent to 
defraud the taker or buyer of the residue of such leases, of whom 
he hath received the money. 

23. Item, the said abbot hath not, according to the foundation 
of his monastery, admitted freely tenants into certain alms-houses 
belonging to the said monastery ; but of them he hath taken laroe 
fines, and some of them he hath put away that would not give him 
fines ; whither poor, aged, and impotent people were wont to be 
freely admitted, and [to] receive the founder's alms that of the 
old customs [were] limited to the same — which ahns is also 
diminished by the said abbot. 

24. Item, that the said abbot did not deliver the bulls of his 



842 The Dissolution of the 3Ionasteries. 

bishopric, that he purchased from Rome, to our sovereign lord the 
king's council till long after the time he had delivered and exhib- 
ited the bulls of his monastery to them. 

25. Item, that the said abbot hath detained and yet doth detain 
servants' wages ; and often when the said servants hath asked 
their wages, the said abbot hath put them into the stocks, and beat 
them. 

26. Item, the said abbot, in times past, hath had a great devo- 
tion to ride to Llangarvan, in Wales, upon Lammas-day, to receive 
pardon there ; and on the even he would visit one Mary Hawle 
an old acquaintance of his, at the Welsh Poole, and on the morrow 
ride .to the foresaid Llangarvan, to be confessed and absolved, and 
the same night return to company with the said Mary Hawle, at 
the Welsh Poole aforesaid, and Kateryn, the said Mary Hawle her 
first daughter, whom the said abbot long hath kept to concubine, 
and had children by her, that he lately married at Ludlow. And 
[there be] others that have been taken out of his chamber and 
put in the stocks within the said abbey, and others that have com- 
plained upon him to the king's council of the Marches of Wales ; 
and the woman that dashed out his teeth, that he would have had 
by violence, I will not name now, nor other men's wives, lest it 
would offend your good lordship to read or hear the same. 

27. Item, the said abbot doth daily embezzle, sell, and convey 
the goods and chattels, and jewels of the said monastery, having 
no need so to do : for it is thought that he hath a thousand marks 
or two thousand lying by him that he hath gotten by selling of 
orders, and the jewels and plate of the monastery and corradyes ; 
and it is to be feared that he will alienate all the rest, unless your 
good lordship speedily make redress and provision to let the same. 

28. Item, the said abbot was accustomed yearly to preach at 
Leyntwarden on the Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, 
where and when the people were wont to offer to an image there, 
and to the same the said abbot in his sermons would exhort them 
and encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed, the abbot, 
espying the image then to have a cote of silver plate and gilt, hath 
taken away of his own authority the said image, and the plate 
turned to his own use ; and left his preaching there, saying it is 
no manner of profit to any man, and the plate that was about the 
said image was named to be worth forty pounds. 

29. Item, the said abbot hath ever nourished enmity and dis- 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 343 

cord among liis brethren t and hath not encouraged them to learn 
the laws and the mystery of Christ. But he that least knew was 
most cherished by him ; and he hath been highly displeased and 
[hath] disdained when his brothers would say that "it is God's 
precept and doctrine that ye ought to prefer before your ceremo- 
nies and vain constitutions." This saying was high disobedient, 
and should be grievously punished; when that lying, obloquy, 
flattery, ignorance, derision, contumely, disorder, great swearing, 
drinking, hypocrisy, fraud, superstition, deceit, conspiracy to 
wronf»' their neighbor, and other of that kind, was had in special 
favor and regard. Laud and praise be to God that hath sent us 
the true knowledge. Honor and long prosperity to our sov- 
ereio-n lord and his noble council, that teaches to advance the same. 
Amen. 

By John Lee, your faithful bedeman, and canon of the said 
Monastery of Wigmore. 

Postscript. — My good lord, there is in the said abbey a cross of 
fine gold and precious stones, whereof one diamond was esteemed 
by Doctor Booth, Bishop of Hereford, worth a hundred marks. 
In that cross is inclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross 
that Christ died upon, and to the same hath been offering. And 
when it should be brought down to the church from the treasury, 
it was brought down with lights, and like reverence as should have 
been done to Christ himself I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday 
next, when he may enter the treasury, will take aAvay the said 
cross and break it, or turn it to his own use, with many other 
precious jewels that be there. 

All these articles afore written be true as to the substance and 
true uieaning of them, though peradventure for haste and lack of 
counsel, some words be set amiss or out of their place. That I 
will be readv to prove forasmuch as lies in me. when it shall like 
your honorable lordship to direct your commission to men (or 
any man) that will be indiff'erent and not corrupt to sit upon the 
same, at the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most 
ready and the truth is best known, or at any other place where 
it shall be thought most convenient by your high discretion and 
authority. 

The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Praemunire 
statutes, which forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome 



344 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

under penalty of outlawry, have been usually considered 
in the highest degree oppressive ; and more particularly 
the public censure has fallen upon the last application of 
those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of 
the clergy were laid under a praemunire, and only obtained 
pardon on payment of a serious fine. Let no one regret 
that he has learnt to be tolerant to Roman Catholics as the 
nineteenth century knows them. But it is a spurious 
charity which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its 
opposite ; and when philosophic historians indulge in loose 
invective against the statesmen of the Reformation, they 
show themselves unfit to be trusted with the custody of our 
national annals. The Acts of Parliament speak plainly of 
the enormous abuses which had grown up under these 
bulls. Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes 
scarcely prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with 
jewels stolen from his own convent a faculty to confer holy 
orders, though he had never been consecrated bishop, and 
to make a thousand pounds by selling the exercise of his 
privileges. This is the most flagrant case which has fallen 
under the eyes of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice 
specimen out of many. He was taught to believe, like 
other modern students of history, that the papal dispensa- 
tions for immorality, of which we read in Fox and other 
Protestant writers, were calumnies, but he has been forced 
against his will to perceive that the supposed calumnies 
were but the plain truth ; he has found among the records 
— for one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one 
diocese who had obtained licenses to keep concubines.^ 
After some experience, he advises all persons who are 
anxious to understand the English Reformation to place 
implicit confidence in the Statute Book. Every fresh 
record which is brought to light is a fresh evidence in 
its favor. In the fluctuations of the conflict there were 
parliaments, as there were princes, of opposing sentiments ; 

1 Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 345 

and measures were passed, amended, repealed, or cen- 
sured, as Protestants and Catholics came alternately into 
power. But whatever were the differences of opinion, the 
facts on either side which are stated in an Act of Parlia- 
ment may be uniformly trusted. Even in the attainders 
for treason and heresy we admire the truthfulness of the 
details of the indictments, although we dejDlore the preju- 
dice which at times could make a crime of virtue. 

We pass on to the next picture. Equal justice, or some 
attempt at it, was promised, and we shall perhaps part from 
the friends of the monasteries on better terms than they 
believe. At least, we shall add to our own history and to 
the Catholic martyrology a story of genuine interest. 

W6 have many accounts of the abbeys at the time of 
their actual dissolution. The resistance or acquiescence 
of superiors, the dismissals of the brethren, the sale of the 
property, the destruction of relics, &c., are all described. 
"We know how the windows were taken out, how the glass 
was appropriated, how the " melter " accompanied the visi- 
tors to run the lead upon the roofs and the metal of the bells 
into portable forms. We see the pensi6ned regulars filing 
out reluctantly, or exulting in their deliverance, discharged 
from their vows, furnished each with his " secular apparel," 
and his purse of money, to begin the world as he might. 
These scenes have long been partially known, and they 
were rarely attended with any thing remarkable. At the 
time of the suppression, the discipline of several years had 
broken down opposition, and prepared the way for the 
catastrophe. The end came at last, but as an issue which 
had been long foreseen. 

We have sought in vain, however, for a glimpse into the 
interior of the houses at the first intimation of what was 
coming — more especially when the great blow was struck 
which severed England from obedience to Rome, and as- 
serted the independence of the Anglican Church. Then, 
virtually, the flite of the monasteries was decided. As soon 



346 The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 

as the supremacy was vested in the Crown, inquiry into 
their condition could no longer be escaped or delayed; and 
then, through the length and breadth of the country, there 
must have been rare dismay. The account of the London 
Carthusians is indeed known to us, because they chose to 
die rather than yield submission where their consciences 
forbade them ; and their isolated heroism has served to dis- 
tinguish their memories. The pope, as head of the Uni- 
versal Church, claimed the power of absolving subjects 
from their allegiance to their king. He deposed Henry. 
He called on foreign princes to enforce his sentence ; and, 
on pain of excommunication, commanded the native English 
to rise in rebellion. The king, in self-defense, was com- 
pelled to require his subjects to disclaim all sympathy with 
these pretensions, and to recognize no higher authority, 
spiritual or secular, than himself within his own dominions. 
The regular clergy throughout the country were on the 
pope's side, secretly or oj^enly. The Charterhouse monks, 
however, alone of all the order, had the courage to declare 
their convictions, and to suffer for them. Of the rest, we 
only perceive that* they at last submitted ; and since there 
was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we have been 
disposed to judge them hardly as cowards. Yet we who 
have never been tried, should perhaps be cautious in our 
censures. It is possible to hold an opinion quite honestly, 
and yet to hesitate about dying for it. We consider our- 
selves, at the present day, jDcrsuaded honestly of many 
things ; yet which of them should we refuse to relinquish 
if the scaffold were the alternative — or at least seem to 
relinquish, under silent protest ? 

And yet, in the details of the struggle at the Charter- 
house, we see the forms of mental trial which' must have 
repeated themselves among all bodies of the clergy wdier- 
ever there was seriousness of conviction. If the majority 
of the monks were vicious and sensual, there was still a 
large minority laboring to be true to their vows; and 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 347 

when one entire convent was capable of sustained resist- 
ance, there must have been many where there was only 
just too little virtue for the emergency — where the con- 
flict between interest and conscience was equally genuine, 
though it ended the other way. Scenes of bitter misery 
there must have been — of passionate emotion wrestling 
ineifectually with the iron resolution of the Government : 
and the faults of the Catholic party weigh so heavily 
against them in the course and progress of the Reforma- 
tion, that we cannot willingly lose the few countervailing 
tints which soften the darkness of their conditions. 

Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at 
this crisis, we have hitherto been left to our imagination. 
A stern and busy administration had little leisure to pre- 
serve records of sentimental struggles which led to nothing. 
The Catholics did not care to keep aHve the recollection 
of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty, the 
Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have 
brought down to us any fragment of a transaction which 
no one had an interest in remembering. That such an 
accident has really occurred, we may consider as unusually 
fortunate. The story in question concerns the Abbey of 
Woburn, and is as follows : — 

At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there 
were representatives of both the factions which divided the 
country ; perhaps we should say of three — the sincere 
Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants. These 
last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened 
into silence, and with difficulty had been able to save 
themselves from extrcjne penalties. No sooner, however, 
had Wolsey fallen, and the battle connnenced with the 
papacy," than the tables turned, the persecuted became per- 
secutors — or at least threw off" their disguise — and were 
strengthened with the support of the large class who cared 
only to keep on the winning side. The mysteries of the 
faith came to be disputed at the public tables ; the refiic- 



343 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

tories rang with polemics ; the sacred silence of the dor- 
mitories was broken for the first time by lawless specula- 
tion. The orthodox might have appealed to the Govern- 
ment : heresy was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, 
was still punished by the stake. But the orthodox among 
the regular clergy adhered to the pope as well as to the 
faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as 
deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of 
calling in the help of the law, they muttered treason 
in secret ; and the Reformers, confident in the neces- 
sities of the times, sent reports to London of their 
arguments and conversations. The authorities in the 
abbey were accused of disaffection ; and a commission of 
inquiry was sent down towards the end of the spring of 
1536, to investigate. The depositions taken on this occa- 
sion are still preserved ; and with the help of them, we 
can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last 
echoes of the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying 
away in discord. 

Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of 
course, passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, 
the spread of Protestantism, the power of the pope, the 
state of England — all were discussed ; and the possibil- 
ities of the future, as each party painted it in the colors 
of his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke their minds in 
plain language, sometimes condescending to a joke. 

Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior, " on 
Candlemas-day last past (February 2, 1536), asked him 
whether he longed not to be at Rome where all his bulls 
were ? " Brother Sherborne answered that " his bulls had 
made so many calves, that he had burned them. Where- 
unto the sub-prior said he thought there were more calves 
now than there were then." 

Then there were long and furious quarrels about •' my 
Lord Privy Seal" (Cromwell) — who was to one party, 
the incarnation of Satan ; to the other, the delivering angel. 



The Dis§olutio7i of the Monasteries, 349 

Nor did matters mend when from the minister they 
passed to the master. 

Dan John Croxton beingr in " the shavins^-house " one 
day with certain of the brethren having their tonsures 
looked to, and gossiping, as men do on such occasions, one 
" Friar Lawrence did say that the king was dead." Then 
said Croxton, " Thanks be to God, his Grace is in good 
health, and I pray God so continue him ; " and said fur- 
ther to the said Lawrence, " I advise thee to leave thy 
babbling." Croxton, it seems, had been among the sus- 
pected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, " Croxton, it 
maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the 
new world ; " whereupon hotter still the conversation pro- 
ceeded. " Thy babbling tongue," Croxton said, '' will turn 
us all to displeasure at length." " Then," quoth Lawrence, 
" neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do well as long as 
we forsake our head of the Church, the pope." '' By the 
mass ! " quoth Croxton, " I would thy Pope Roger were in 
thy belly, or thou in his, for thou art a false perjured knave 
to thy prince." Whereunto the said Lawrence answered, 
saying, •' By the mass, thou liest ! I was never sworn to 
forsake the pope to be our head, and never will be." 
'• Then," quoth Croxton, " thou shalt be sworn spite of 
thine heart one day, or I will know why nay." 

These and similar wranglings may be taken as speci- 
niens of the daily conversation at Woburn, and we can 
l^erceive how an abbot with the best intentions would 
have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are in- 
stances of superiors in other houses throwing down their 
command in the midst of the crisis in fiat despair, pro- 
testing that their subject brethren were no longer govern- 
able. Abbots who were inclined to the Reformation could 
not manage the Catholics ; Catholic abbots could not man- 
age the Protestants ; indifferent abbots could not manage 
either the one or the other. It would have been well for 
the Abbot of Woburn — or well as far as this world is con- 



350 The Dissolutio7i of the Monasteries. 

cerned — if he, like one of these, had acknowledged his 
incapacity, and had fled from his charge. 

His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, 
history is silent. We know only, that he held his place 
when the storm rose against the pope ; that, like the rest 
of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the oath to 
the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but 
swearing under protest, as the phrase went, with the out- 
ward, and not with the inward man — in fact, perjuring 
himself Though infirm, so far, however, he was too hon- 
est to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous eyes 
of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his 
tendencies. We have significant evidence of the espionage 
which was established over all suspected quarters, in the 
conversations and trifling details of conduct, on the part of 
the abbot, which were reported to the Government. 

In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's 
name should be rased out wherever it was mentioned in 
the Mass books. A malcontent, by name Robert Salford, 
deposed that " he was singing mass before the abbot at 
St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he 
rased out with his knife the said name out of the canon." 
The abbot told him to " take a pen and strike or cross him 
out." The saucy monk said those were not the orders. 
They were to rase him out. '^ Well, well," the abbot said, 
" it will come again one day." " Come again, will it ? " 
was the answer ; " if it do, then we will put him in again ; 
but I trust I shall never see that day." The mild abbot 
could remonstrate, but could not any more command ; 
and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remem- 
bered against him for the ear of Cromwell. 

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to 
preach against the pope, and to expose his usurpation ; 
but he could not bring himself to obey. He shrank from 
the pulpit ; he preached but twice after the visitation, and 
then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the ser- 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 351 

mon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. 
He only said, " You shall pray for the spirituality, the tem- 
porality, and the souls that be in the pains of purgatory ; 
and did not name the king to be supreme head of the 
Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak against 
the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome." 

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, 
proposed to call a general council at Mantua, against which, 
by advice of Henry the Eighth, the Germans protested, 
we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious English eyes were 
watching for a turning tide. " Hear you," said the abbot 
one day, " of the pope's holiness and the congregation of 
bishops, abbots, and princes gathered to the council at 
Mantua ? They be gathered for the reformation of the 
universal Church ; and here now we have a book of the 
excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what here- 
tics they be : for if they were Catholics and true men as 
they pretend to be, they would never have refused to come 
to a oreneral council." 

o 

So matters went with the abbot for some months after he 
had sworn obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience 
with such opiates as the casuists could provide for him, he 
watched anxiously for a change, and labored with but 
little reserve to hold his brethren to their old allegiance. 

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over 
the scene, very different from the outward reaction for 
which he was looking, and a better mind woke in the ab- 
bot: he learnt that in swearing what he did not mean 
with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to 
Heaven and lied to man ; that to save his miserable life he 
had periled his soul. When the oath of supremacy was 
required of the nation. Sir Thomas More, JMshop Fisher, 
and the monks of the Charterhouse — mistaken, as M'e be- 
lieve, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and dis- 
daining evasion or subterfuge — chose, witli deliberate 
nobleness, rather to die than to perjure themselves. This 



352 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

is no place to enter on the great question of the justice or 
necessity of those executions ; but the story of the so-called 
martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope 
shook upon his throne ; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue 
stood still ; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that 
the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a thing 
of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation of English 
sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran through Europe. 
The fury of party leaves little room for generous emotion, 
and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protest- 
ants. The Protestants knew well that if these same suf- 
ferers could have had their way, they would themselves 
have been sacrificed by hecatombs ; and as they had never 
experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy. 
But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher be- 
lieved, but who had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, 
his death and the death of the rest acted as a glimpse of 
the Judgment Day. Their safety became their shame and 
terror ; and in the radiant example before them of true 
faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own 
disgrace. So it was with Father Forest, who had taught 
his penitents in confession that they might perjure them- 
selves, and who now sought a cruel death in voluntary ex- 
piation ; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glaston- 
bury ; so with others whose names should be more fiimiliar 
to us than they are ; and here in Woburn we are to see 
the feeble but genuine penitence of Abbot Hobbes. He 
was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did what 
he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the 
Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had 
no hope of concealment. 

" At the time," deposed Robert Salford, " that the monks 
of the Charterhouse, with other traitors, did suffer death, 
the abbot did call us into the chapter-house, and said these 
words : — ' Brethren, this is a perilous time ; such a scourge 
was never heard since Christ's passion. Ye hear how good 



The Dissolution of the 31onasteries, 853 

men suffer the death. Brethren, this is imdoiibted for our 
offenses. Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept 
the commandments of God, so long their enemies had no 
power over them, but God took vengeance of their enemies. 
But when they broke God's commandments, then they were 
subdued by their enemies, and so be we. Therefore let us 
be sorry for our offenses. Undoubted He will take ven- 
geance of our enemies ; T mean those heretics that causeth 
so many good men to suffer thus. Alas, it is a piteous 
case that so much Christian blood should be shed. There- 
fore, good brethren, for the reverence of God, every one of 
you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm, " God, the hea- 
then are come into thine inheritance ; thy holy temple 
have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. 
The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be 
meat to the fowls of the air, and the flesh of thy saints 
unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have they shed 
like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no 
man to bury them. We are become an open scorn unto 
our enemies, a very scorn and derision unto them that are 
round about us. Oh, remember not our old sins, but have 
mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great 
misery. Help us, God of our salvation, for the glory of 
thy name. Oh, be merciful unto our sins for thy name's 
sake. Wherefore do the heathen say. Where is now their 
God ? " Ye shall say this Psalm,' repeated the abbot, ' every 
Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the 
high altar, and undoubtedly God will cease this extreme 
scourge.' And so," continues Salford, significantly, " the 
convent did say this aforesaid Psalm until there were cer- 
tain that did murmur at the saying of it, and so it was left." 
The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but 
languid support ; even his own familiar friends whom he 
trusted, those with whom he had walked in the house of 
God, had turned against him ; the harsh air of the dawn 
of a new world choked him ; what was there for him 



354 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

but to die ? But his conscience still haunted him ; while 
he lived he must fight on, and so, if possible, find par- 
don for his perjury. The blows in those years fell upon 
the Church thick and fast. In February, 1536, the Bill 
passed for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries ; 
and now we find the sub-prior with the whole fraternity 
united in hostility, and the abbot without one friend re- 
maining. 

" He did again call us together," says the next deposi- 
tion, " and lamentably mourning for the dissolving the 
said houses, he enjoined us to sing ' Salvator mundi, salva 
nos omnes,' every day after lauds ; and we murmured at 
it, and were not content to sing it for such cause ; and so 
we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto 
the chapter, and did in manner rebuke us, and said we 
were bound to obey his commandment by our profession, 
and so did command us to sing it again, with the versicle 
' Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let 
them also that hate him flee before him.' Also he enjoined 
us at every mass that every priest did sing, to say the col- 
lect, ' O God, who despisest not the sighing of a contrite 
heart.' And he said if we did this with good and true de- 
votion, God would so handle the matter, thai it should be 
to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he 
showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, 
there will come to us a good man that will rectify these 
monasteries again that be now supprest, because ' God can 
of these stones raise up children to Abraham.' " 

" Of the stones," perhaps, but less easily of the stony- 
hearted monks, who, with pitiless smiles, watched the ab- 
bot's sorrow, which should soon bring him to his ruin. 

Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the 
abbot grew more lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he 
was still unable to make up his mind to the course which 
he knew to be right ; but he slowly strengthened himself 
for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with 



The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 355 

it a more special call to effort ; he did not fail to recognize 
it. The conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. 
They preached against all which he most loved and valued, 
in language purposely coarse ; and the mild sweetness of the 
rebukes which he administered, showed plainly on which 
side lay, in the Abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the 
spirit of Heaven. Now, when the passions of those times 
have died away, and we can look back with more indif- 
ferent eyes, how touching is the following scene. There 
was one Sir William, curate of Woburn Chapel, whose 
tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot 
met him one day, and spoke to him. " Sir William," he 
said, '• I hear tell ye be a great railer. I marvel that ye 
rail so. I pray you teach my cure the Scripture of God, 
and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such 
railing. Ye call the pope a bear and a bandog. Either 
he is a sood man or an ill. Domino suo stat aut cadit. 
The office of a bishop is honorable. What edifying is this 
to rail ? Let him alone." 

But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the 
abbot alone. He grew " somewhat acrased," they said ; 
vexed with feelings of which they had no experience. He 
fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing upon 
him. The brethren went to see him in his room ; one 
Brother Dan Woburn came among the rest, and asked him 
how he did ; the abbot answered, " I would that I had died 
with the good men that died for holding with the pope. 
My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every day 
for it." Life was fast losing its value for him. What was 
life to him or any man when bought with a sin against his 
soul ? " If the abbot be disposed to die, for that matter," 
Brother Croxton observed, " he may die as soon as he will." 

All Lent he fasted and prayed, and his illness grew upon 
him ; and at length in Passion Week he thought all was 
over, and that he was going away. On Passion Sunday he 
called the brethren about him, and as they stood round his 



356 The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

bed, with their cold, hard eyes, " he exhorted them all to 
charity ; " he implored them " never to consent to go out 
of their monastery ; and if it chanced them to be put from 
it, they should in no wise forsake their habit." After these 
words, " being in a great agony, he rose out of his bed, and 
cried out and said, ' I would to God, it would please Him to 
take me out of this wretched world ; and I would I had 
died with the good men that have suffered death hereto- 
fore, for they were quickly out of their pain.' " ^ Then, 
half wandering, he began to mutter to himself aloud the 
thoughts which had been working in him in his struggles ; 
and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he ex- 
claimed, " Tu quis es primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, 
auctoritate Moses, judicatu Samuel, potestate Petrus, unc- 
tione Christus. Ali^e ecclesiae habent super se pastores. 
Tu pastor pastorum es." 

Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction 
begotten out of the brain of some ingenious novelist, but 
the record of the true words and sufferings of a crenuine 
child of Adam, laboring in a trial too hard for him. 

He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come 
to him ; but not, after all, in the sick-bed, with his expia- 
tion but half completed. A year before, he had thrown 
down the cross when it was offered him. He was to take 
it again — the very cross which he had refused. He re- 
covered. He was brought before the council ; with what 
result, there are no means of knowing. To admit the 
papal supremacy when officially questioned was high trea- 
son. Whether the abbot was constant, and received some 
conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the 
moment failed him — whichever he did, the records ^are 
silent. This only we ascertain of him : that he was not 
put to death under the statute of supremacy. But, two 
years later, when the official list was presented to the Par- 
liament of those who had suffered for their share in " the 
1 Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the Carthusians. 



The D{ssolutio7i of the Monasteries, 357 

Pilgrimage of Grace," among the rest we find the name 
of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn. To this soli- 
tary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put 
down, and in the punishment of the offenders there was 
unusual leniency ; not more than thirty persons were ex- 
ecuted, although forty thousand had been in arms. Those 
only were selected who had been most signally implicated. 
But they were all leaders in the movement ; the men of 
highest rank, and therefore greatest guilt. They died for 
what they believed their duty ; and the king and council 
did their duty in enforcing the laws against armed insur- 
gents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be 
contending has long since judged between them ; and 
both parties perhaps now see all things with clearer eyes 
than was permitted to them on earth. 

We also can see more distinctly. We will not refuse 
the Abbot Hobbes a brief record of his trial and passion. 
And although twelve generations of Russells — all loyal 
to the Protestant ascendancy — have swept Woburn clear 
of Catholic associations, they, too, in these later days, will 
not regret to see revived the authentic story of its last 
abbot. 



ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES. 



1. The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt, in his 
Voyage in the South Sea in 1593. Reprinted from the Edition 
of 1622, and Edited by R. H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum. 
Published by the Hakluyt Society. 

2. The Discoverie of the Empire of Guiana. By Sir Walter 
Ralegh, Knt. Edited, with copious Explanatory Notes, and 
a Biographical Memoir, by Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Phil. 
D., &c. 

3. Narratives of Early Voyages undertaken for the Discovery 
of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the Northioest ; with Selec- 
tions from the Records of the Worshipful Fellowship of the Mer- 
chants of London, trading into the East Indies, and from MSS. 
in the Library of the British Museum, now first published, by 
Thomas Rundall, Esq. 

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American conti- 
nent, the Planetary system, and the infinite deep of the 
Heavens, have now become common and familiar facts to 
us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our school- 
days ; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our ear- 
liest breath of consciousness. It is all but impossible to 
throw back our imagination into the time when, as new 
grand discoveries, they stirred every mind which they 
touched with awe and wonder at the revelation which God 
had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and ma- 
terial continents lay for the first time displayed, opening 
fields of thought and fields of enterprise of which none 
could conjecture the limit. Old routine was broken up. 

1 Westmins.ter Review, 1853. 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 359 

Men were thrown back on their own strength and their 
own power, unshackled, to accomplish whatever they 
might dare. And although we do not speak of these dis- 
coveries as the cause of that enormous force of heart 
and intellect which accompanied them (for they were as 
much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the 
other), yet at any rate they afforded scope and room 
for the play of powers which, without such scope, let 
them have been as transcendent as they would, must 
have passed away unproductive and blighted. 

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real 
conviction of the divine and devilish forces by which the 
universe was ouided and misguided, was the inheritance 
of the Elizabethan age from Catholic Christianity. The 
fiercest and most lawless men did then really and truly 
believe in the actual personal presence of God or the 
devil in every accident, or scene, or action. They brought 
to the contemplation of the new heaven and the new earth 
an imagination saturated with the spiritual convictions of 
the old era, which were not lost, but only infinitely ex- 
panded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to 
recognize, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil 
or fo^r good ; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon ; 
and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshipers of 
the real devil, and were assisted with the full power of his 
evil army. 

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and 
general way we may continue to use its phraseology, has 
become, in its detailed application to life, utterly strange to 
us. We congratulate ourselves on the enlargement of 
our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law 
courts in cases of supposed witchcraft ; we smile compla- 
cently over Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, 
and rejoice that we are not such as he — entangled in the 
cobwebs of effete and foolish superstition. Yet the true con- 
clusion is less flattering to our vanity. That Raleigh and 



360 England^s Forgotten Worthies. 

Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be what 
they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury 
which such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignifi- 
cant ; and arising, as they arose, from a never-failing sense 
of the real awfulness and mystery of the world, and of the 
life of human souls. upon it, they witness to the presence 
in such minds of a siDirit, the loss of which not the most 
perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole cre- 
ation moves can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, 
the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare's characters, so 
far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate, 
and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the 
poet, who has outstripped Nature in his creations. But we 
are misunderstanding the power and the meaning of 
poetry in attributing creativeness to it in any such sense. 
Shakespeare created, but only as the spirit of Nature 
created around him, working in him as it worked abroad 
in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draw^s 
were such men as he saw and knew ; the words they utter 
were such as he heard in the ordinary conversations in 
which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with 
Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he 
found the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlan- 
dos, his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer 
personal acquaintance which we can form with the English 
of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are satisfied that 
Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic 
echo of the life which it depicts. 

It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of 
the formation of a society which was to employ itself, as 
we understood, in republishing in accessible form some, if 
not all, of the invaluable records compiled or composed by 
Richard Hakluyt. Books, like every thing else, have their 
appointed death-day ; the souls of them, unless they be 
found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with 
the paper in which they lived ; and the early folio Hak- 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 361 

luyts, not from their own want of merit, but from our neg- 
lect of them, were expiring of old age. The five-volume 
quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then 
cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 
270 copies. It was intended for no more than for curious 
antiquaries, or for the great libraries, where it could be 
consulted as a book of reference ; and among a people, 
the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name, 
the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much 
as occurred to them that general readers would care to 
have the book within their reach. 

And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose 
Epic of the modern English nation. They contain the 
heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom the 
new era was inaugurated ; not mythic, like the Iliads and 
the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts, 
which nval legend in interest and grandeur. What the 
old epics were to the royally or nobly born, this modern 
epic is to the common people. We have no longer kings 
or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism, like the 
dominion of the world, had in time past been confined. 
But, as it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor 
fishermen from an obscure lake in Palestine assumed, 
under the Divine mission, the spiritual i^athority over man- 
kind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen 
from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym 
and the Dart, self-taught and self-directed, Avith no impulse 
but what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out 
across the unknown seas, fightins^, discoverinor, colonizincr, 
and graved out the channels, paving them at last with their 
bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of 
England has flowed out over all the world. We can con- 
ceive nothing, not the songs of Homer himself, which 
would be read among us with more enthusiastic interest 
than these plain massive tales ; and a people's edition of 
them in these days, when the writings of Ains worth and 



362 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

Eugene Sue circulate in tens of thousands, \A'Ould per- 
haps be the most blessed antidote which could be bestowed 
upon us. The heroes themselves were the men of the 
people — the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes ; 
and no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, 
lent its polish or its varnish to set them off. In most cases 
the captain himself, or his clerk or servant, or some un- 
known gentleman volunteer, sat down and chronicled the 
voyage which he had shared ; and thus inorganically arose 
a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are 
for nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, 
warmed with natural feeling, which displays itself through 
all their pages. With us, the sailor is scarcely himself be- 
yond his quarter-deck. If he is distinguished in his pro- 
fession, he is professional merely ; or if he is more than 
that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to independ- 
ent domestic culture. With them their profession was the 
school of their nature, a high moral education which most 
brought out what was most nobly human in them ; and the 
wonders of earth, and air, and sea, and sky, were a real 
intelligible language in which they heard Almighty God 
speaking to them. 

That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the 
Hakluyt Society should in some measure be disappointed, 
is only what might naturally be anticipated of all very san- 
guine expectation. Cheap editions are expensive editions 
to the publisher ; and historical societies, from a necessity 
which appears to encumber all corporate English action, 
rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. 
Yet, after all allowances and deductions, we cannot recon- 
cile ourselves to the mortification of having found but one 
volume in the series to be even tolerably edited, and that 
one to be edited by a gentleman to whom England is but 
an adopted country — Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's 
" Conquest of Guiana," with Sir Robert's sketch of Ra- 
leigh's history and character, form in every thing but its 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 363 

cost a very model of an excellent volume. For the re- 
maining editors,^ we are obliged to say that they have ex- 
erted themselves successfully to paralyze whatever interest 
was reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their own volumes 
to the same obscurity to which time and accident were con- 
signing the earlier editions. Very little which was really 
noteworthy escaped the industry of Hakluyt himself, and 
we looked to find reprints of the most remarkable of the 
stories which were to be found in his collection. The ed- 
itors began unfortunately with proposing to continue the 
work where he had left it, and to produce narratives hitherto 
unpublished of other voyages of inferior interest, or not of 
English origin. Better thoughts appear to have occurred 
to them in the course of the work ; but their evil destiny 
overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves 
executed. We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing 
the title of " Voyages to the Northwest," in hope of find- 
ing our old friends Davis and Frobisher. We found a vast 
unnecessary Editor's Preface ; and instead of the voyages 
themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral 
beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine 
of Hukluyt, we encountered an analysis and digest of their 
results, which Milton was called in to justify in an inappro- 
priate quotation. It is much as if they had undertaken to 
edit "Bacon's Essays," and had retailed what they con- 
ceived to be the substance of them in their own language ; 
strangely failing to see that the real value of the actions 
or the thoughts of remarkable men does not lie in the ma- 
terial result which can be gathered from them, but in the 
heart and soul of the actors or speakers themselves. Con- 
sider what Homer's " Odyssey " would be, reduced into an 
analysis. 

The editor of the " Letters of Columbus " apologizes for 
the rudeness of the old seaman's phraseology. Columbus, 
he tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the 
1 This essay was written 15 years ago. 



364 England^s Forgotten Worthies. 

art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him. We 
are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, be- 
fore we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings 
under which a man of the highest order was staggering to- 
wards the end of his earthly calamities ; although the in- 
articulate fragments in which his thought breaks out from 
him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which literary 
pathos is poor and meaningless. 

And even in the subjects which they select they are pur- 
sued by the same curious fatality. Why is Drake to be 
best known, or to be only known, in his last voyage ? Why 
pass over the success, and endeavor to immortalize the fail- 
ure ? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw 
both oceans, and vowed that he would sail a ship in the 
Pacific ; when he crawled out upon the cliffs of Terra del 
Fuego, and leaned his head over the southernmost angle of 
the world ; when he scored a furrow round the globe with 
his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the 
antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another 
man from what he had become after twenty years of court- 
life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting and gold-hunting. 
There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as the 
last act of his career ; but it is his life, not his death, 
which we desire — not what he failed to do, but what he 
did. 

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive 
than all these is the editor of Hawkins's " Voyage to the 
South Sea." The narrative is striking in itself; not one 
of the best, but very good ; and, as it is republished com- 
plete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully shutting 
off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall 
then find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone 
of all the writings of the period. 

It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which 
did no dishonor to him who sunk under it ; and there is a 
melancholy dignity in the style in which Hawkins tells his 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 365 

story, which seems to say, that though he had been de- 
feated, and had never again an opportunity of winning 
back his lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart 
with which he endured a shame which would have broken a 
smaller man. It would have required no large exertion of 
editorial self-denial to have abstained from marring the 
pages with puns of which " Punch " would be ashamed, 
and with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which 
the sea-captain of the nineteenth century condescends to 
criticize and approve of his half-barbarous precursor. And 
what excuse can we find for such an offense as this which 
follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians is 
the most gallant episode in the history of the New World. 
The Spaniards themselves were not behindhand in ac- 
knowledging the chivalry before which they quailed, and, 
after many years of ineffectual efforts, they gave up a con- 
flict which they never afterwards resumed ; leaving the 
Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they 
came in contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear 
from them. It is a subject for an epic poem ; and what- 
ever admiration is due to the heroism of a brave people 
whom no inequality of strength could appall and no defeats 
could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of 
us. The story of the war was well known in Europe ; 
Hawkins, in coasting the western shores of South America, 
fell in with them, and the finest passage in his book is the 
relation of one of the incidents of the war : — 

An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and 
for that he was of name, and known to have done his devoir 
against them, they cut off his hands, thereby intending to disena- 
ble him to fight any more against them. But he, returning home, 
desirous to revenge this injury, to maintain his liberty, with the 
reputation of his nation, and to help to banish the Spaniard, with 
his tongue entreated and incited them to persevere in their accus- 
tomed valor and reputation, abasing the enemy and advancing his 
nation ; condemning their contraries of cowardliness, and con- 



366 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

firming it by the cruelty used with him and other his companions 
in their mishaps ; showing them his arms without hands, and nam- 
ing his brethren whose half feet they had cut off, because they 
might be unable to sit on horseback ; with force arguing that if 
they feared them not, they would not have used so great inhu-' 
manity — for fear produceth cruelty, the companion of cowardice. 
Thus encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs, and lib- 
erty, choosing rather to die an honorable death fighting, than to 
live in servitude as fruitless members of the commonwealth. Thus 
using the office of a sergeant-major, and having loaden his two 
stumps with bundles of arrows, he succored them who, in the 
succeeding battle had their store wasted ; and changing himself 
from place to place, animated and encouraged his countrymen 
with such comfortable persuasions, as it is reported and credibly 
believed, that he did more good with his words and presence, 
without striking a stroke, than a great part of the army did with 
fighting to the utmost. 

It is an action which may take its place by the side of 
the myth of Mucins Scaevola, or the real exploit of that 
brother of the poet ^schylus, who, when the Persians were 
flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till both his hands 
were hewn away, and then seized it with his teeth, leav- 
ing his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of 
Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, 
making his notes, merely, as he tells us, from the sugges- 
tions of his own mind as he revised the proof-sheets, in- 
forms us, at the bottom of the page, that " it reminds him 
of the familiar lines, — 

" For Widdrington I needs must wail, 

As one in doleful dumps ; 
For when his legs were smitten off, 

He fought upon his stumps." 

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the bal- 
lad of " Chevy-Chase." It is the most deformed stanza ^ 

1 Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us too hard 
on Captain Bethune compare them : — 

" For Wetharrington my harte was wo, 
That even he slayne sholde be ; 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 367 

of the modern deformed version which was composed in 
the echpse of heart and taste, on the restoration of the 
Stuarts ; and if such verses could then pass for serious 
poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than 
a burlesque ; the associations which they arouse are only 
absurd, and they could only have continued to ring in :iis 
memory through their ludicrous doggerel. 

"WHien to these offenses of the Society we add, that in 
the long labored appendices and introductions, which fill 
up valuable space, which increase the expense of the edition, 
and into reading which many readers are, no doubt, be- 
trayed, we have found nothing which assists the understand- 
ing of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate — 
when we have declared that we have found what is most 
uncommon passed without notice, and what is most trite 
and familiar encumbered with comment — we have un- 
packed our hearts of the bitterness which these volumes 
have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them 
and go on with our more grateful subject. 

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that 
of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English con- 
stitution were limited in the highest degree, was, notwith- 
standing, more beloved by her subjects than any sovereign 
before or since. It was because, substantially, she was the 
people's sovereign ; because it was given to her to conduct 
the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of 
change, and the weight of her great mind and her great 
place were thrown on the people's side. She was able to 
paralyze the dying efforts with which, if a Stuart had been 
on the throne, the representatives of an effete system might 
have made the struggle a deadly one ; and the history of 
England is not the history of France, because the resolu- 

For when both his leggis were he wen in to, 
He knyled and fought on his knee." 

Even Percy, who, On the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives up 
this stanza as hopeless. 



368 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

tion of one person held the Reformation firm till it had 
rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not 
be ao^ain overthrown. The Catholic faith was no lonoer 
able to furnish standing ground on. which the English or 
any other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feu- 
dalism, as a social organization, was not any more a sys- 
tem under which their energies could have scope to move. 
Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man to 
whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, 
was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen ; and 
great actions were not to remain the privilege of the fami- 
lies of the Norman nobles, but were to be laid within the 
reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him 
to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, 
Elizabeth saw the change which had passed over the world. 
She saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The Eng- 
land of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron, 
was to cast its shell and to become the England of free 
thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to 
plough the ocean with its navies, and sow its colonies over 
the globe ; and the first appearance of these enormous 
forces and the light of the earliest achievements of the 
new era shines through the forty years of the reign of 
Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is 
written, will be seen to be among the most sublime phe- 
nomena which the earth as yet has witnessed, The work 
was not of her creation ; the heart of the whole English 
nation was stirred to its depths ; and Elizabeth's place was 
to recognize, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Govern- 
ment originated nothing ; at such a time it was neither 
necessary nor desirable that it should do so ; but wherever 
expensive enterprises were on foot which promised ultimate 
good, and doubtful immediate profit, we never fail to find 
among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty, 
Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her 
presence, for Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 369 

ships in the river were fitting for distant voyages, the 
Queen would go down in her barge and inspect. Fro- 
bisher, who was but a poor sailor adventurer, sees her 
wave her handkerchief to him from the Greenwich Palace 
windows, and he brings her home a narwhal's horn for a 
present. She honored her people, and her people loved 
her ; and the result was that, with no cost to the Govern- 
ment, she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards, 
planting America with colonies, and exploring the most 
distant seas. Either for honor or for expectation of profit, 
or from that unconscious necessity by which a great people, 
like a great man, will do what is right, and must do it at 
the right time, whoever had the means to furnish a ship, 
and whoever had the talent to command one, laid their 
abilities together and went out to pioneer, and to conquer, 
and take possession, in the name of the Queen of the Sea. 
There was no nation so remote but what some one or other 
was found ready to undertake an expedition there, in the 
hope of opening a trade ; and, let them go where they 
would, they were sure of Elizabeth's countenance. We 
find letters written by her, for the benefit of nameless ad- 
venturers, to every potentate of whom she had ever heard 
— to the Emperors of China, Japan, and India, the Grand 
Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian " Sofee," 
and other unheard-of Asiatic and African princes ; what- 
ever was to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Eliza- 
beth assisted when she could, and admired when she could 
not. The springs of great actions are always difficult to 
analyze — impossible to analyze perfectly — possible to 
analyze only very proximately ; and the force by which a 
man throws a good action out of himself is invisible and 
mystical, like that which brings out the blossom and the 
fruit upon the tree. The motives which we find men urg- 
ing for their enterprises seem often insufficient to have 
prompted them to so large a daring. They did what they 
did from the great unrest in them which made them do it, 
24 



370 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

and what it was may be best measured by the results in the 
present England and America. 

Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the world, 
and in the position of England, to have furnished abun- 
dance of conscious motive, and to have stirred the drowsiest 
minister of routine. 

Among material occasions for exertion, the population 
began to outgrow the employment, and there was a neces- 
sity for plantations to serve as an outlet. Men who, under 
happier circumstances, might have led decent lives, and 
done good service, were now driven by want to desperate 
courses — " witness," as Richard Hakluyt says, " twenty 
tall fellows hanged last Rochester assizes for small rob- 
beries ; " and there is an admirable paper addressed to the 
Privy Council by Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son- 
in-law, pointing out the possible openings to be made in 
or through such plantations for home produce and manu- 
facture. 

Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile 
ambitions, however, lay a chivalrous enthusiasm which in 
these dull days we can hardly, without an effort, realize. 
The life-and-death wrestle between the Reformation and 
the old religion had settled in the last quarter of the six- 
teenth century into a permanent struggle between England 
and Spain. France was disabled. All the help which 
Elizabeth could spare barely enabled the Netherlands to 
defend themselves. Protestantism, if it conquered, must 
conquer on another field ; and by the circumstances of the 
time the championship of the Reformed faith fell to the 
English sailors. The sword of Spain was forged in the 
gold mines of Peru ; the legions of Alva were only to be 
disarmed by intercepting the gold ships on their passage ; 
and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four cen- 
turies before had precijDitated the chivalry of Europe upon 
the East, the same spirit which in its present degeneracy 
covers our bays and rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 371 

out armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic and plunder 
and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could meet them. 

Thus from a combination of causes, the whole force and 
energy of the age was directed towards the sea. The 
wide excitement, and the greatness of the interests at 
stake, raised even common men above themselves ; and 
people who in ordinary times would have been no more 
than mere seamen, or mere money-making merchants, 
appear before us with a largeness and greatness of heart 
and mind in which their duties to God and their country 
are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be para- 
mount to every other. 

Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war 
ships in behalf of the Protestant faith. The cruisers of the 
Spanish Main were full of generous eagerness for the con- 
version of the savage nations to Christianity. And what is 
even more surprising, sites for colonization were examined 
and scrutinized by such men in a lofty statesmanlike spirit, 
and a ready insight was displayed by them into the indi- 
rect eifects of a wisely extended commerce on every high- 
est human interest. 

Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a 
further feeling, a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was 
spurring on the English, and one which must be well un- 
derstood and well remembered, if men like Drake, and 
Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. 
One of the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much 
amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated a 
petty officer as a punishment for some moral offense ; the 
reviewer not being able to see in Drakie, as a man, any 
thing more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, 
whose pretenses to religion might rank with the devotion 
of an Italian bandit to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, 
and even Raleigh, are regarded by superficial persons, who 
see only such outward circumstances of their history as 
correspond with their own impressions. The high nature 



372 England's Forgotten Worthies, 

of these men, and the high objects which they pursued, 
will only rise out and become visible to us as we can throw 
ourselves back into their times and teach our hearts to feel 
as they felt. We do not find in the language of the voy- 
agers themselves, or of those who lent them their help at 
home, any of that weak watery talk of " protection of ab- 
origines," which, as soon as it is translated into fact, be- 
comes the most active policy for their destruction, soul and 
body. But the stories of the dealings of the Spaniards 
with the conquered Indians, which were widely knovt^n in 
England, seem to have aifected all classes of people, not 
with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indig- 
nation. A thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered 
up and down the pages of Hakluyt, who, with a view to 
make them known, translated Peter Martyr's letters ; and 
each commonest sailor-boy who had heard these stories 
from his childhood among the tales of his father's fireside, 
had longed to be a man, that he might go out and become 
the avenger of a gallant and suffering people. ^i^A high 
mission, undertaken with a generous heart, seldom fails to 
make those worthy of it to whom it is given ;) and it was a 
point of honor, if of nothing more, among the English sail- 
ors, to do no discredit by their conduct to the greatness of 
their cause. The high courtesy, the chivalry of the Span- 
ish nobles, so conspicuous in their dealings with their 
European rivals, either failed to touch them in their deal- 
ings with uncultivated idolaters, or the high temper of the 
aristocracy was unable to restrain or to influence the 
masses of the soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it 
would be untrue, to charge upon their religion the griev- 
ous actions of men who called themselves the armed mis- 
sionaries of Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and 
bishops were the loudest in the indignation with which 
they denounced them. But we are obliged to charge upon 
it that slow and subtle influence so inevitably exercised by 
any religion which is divorced from life, and converted 



England^ s Forgotten Worthies. 373 

into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or system — 
which could permit the same men to be extravagant in 
a sincere devotion to the Queen of Heaven^ whose entire 
lower nature, unsubdued and unaffected, was given up to 
thirst of gold, and plunder, and sensuality. If religion 
does not make men more humane than they would be 
without it, it makes them fatally less so ; and it is to be 
feared that the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers, which had 
oscillated to the other extreme, and had again crystallized 
into a formal Antinomian fanaticism, reproduced the same 
fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had set them 
their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan naviga- 
tors, full for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, 
gentleness, and beauty, bear names untainted, as far as we 
know, with a single crime against the savages of America ; 
and the name of England was as famous in the Indian seas 
as that of Spain was infamous. On the banks of the Ori- 
noko there was remembered for a hundred years the 
noble captain who had come there from the great queen 
beyond the seas ; and Raleigh speaks the language of the 
heart of his country, when he urges the English statesmen 
to colonize Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driv- 
ing the white marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the 
Incas to the throne of Peru. 

Who will not be persuaded (he says) that now at length the 
great Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lan^- 
entatious, hath seen the tears and blood of so many millions of 
innocent men, women, and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, 
branded with hot irons, roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, 
whipped, racked, scalded with hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped 
ahve, beheaded in sport, drowned, dashed against the rocks, fam- 
ished, devoured by mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties con- 
sumed, and purposeth to scourge and plague that cursed nation, 
and to take the yoke of servitude from that distressed people, as 
free by nature as any Christian ? 

Poor Raleigh ! if peace and comfort in this world were 



374 England^s Forgotten Worthies. 

of much importance to him, it was in an ill day that he 
provoked the revenge of Spain. The strength of England 
was needed at the moment at its own door ; the Armada 
came, and there was no means of executing such an enter- 
prise. And afterwards the throne of Elizabeth was filled 
by a Stuart, and Guiana was to be no scene of glory for 
Raleigh ; rather, as later historians are pleased to think, it 
was the grave of his reputation. 

But the hope burned clear in him through all the weary 
years of unjust imprisonment ; and when he was a gray- 
headed old man, the base son of a bad mother used it to 
betray him. The success of his last enterprise was made 
the condition under which he was to be pardoned for a 
crime which he had not committed ; and its success de- 
pended, as he knew, on its being kept secret from the 
Spaniards. James required of Raleigh on his allegiance 
a detail of what he proposed, giving him at the same time 
his word as a king that the secret should be safe with him. 
The next day it was sweeping out of the port of London 
in the swiftest of the Spanish ships, with private orders to 
the Governor of St. Thomas to provoke a collision when 
Raleigh should arrive there, which should afterward cost 
him his heart's blood. 

We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of 
epithets under which Raleigh has catalogued the Indian 
sufferings, hoping that they are exaggerated, seeing that 
they are horrible, and closing our eyes against them with 
swiftest haste ; but it was not so when every epithet sug- 
gested a hundred familiar facts ; and some of these (not 
resting on English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence, 
which is too full of shame and sorrow to be suspected) 
shall be given in this place, however old a story it may be 
thought ; because, as we said above, it is impossible to un- 
derstand the actions of these men, unless we are familiar 
with the feelings of which their hearts were full. 

The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 375 

they were, were not the occasion which stirred the deepest 
indignation. They had the excuse of what might be 
called, for want of a better word, necessity, and of the des- 
perate position of small bands of men in the midst of ene- 
mies who might be counted by millions. And in De Soto, 
when he burnt his guides in Florida (it was his practice, 
when there was danger of treachery, that those who were 
left alive might take warning) ; or in Vasco Nunnez, 
praying to the Virgin on the mountains of Darien, and 
going down from off them into the valleys to hunt the 
Indian caciques, and fling them alive to his bloodhounds ; 
there was, at least, with all this fierceness and cruelty, a 
desperate courage which we cannot refuse to admire, and 
which mingles with and corrects our horror. It is tl e 
refinement of the Spaniard's cruelty in the settled and con- 
quered provinces, excused by no danger and provoked by 
no resistance, the details of which witness to the infernal 
coolness with which it was perpetrated ; and the great 
bearing of the Indians themselves under an oppression 
which they despaired of resisting, raises the whole history 
to the rank of a world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler 
but weaker nature was crushed under a malignant force 
which was stronger and yet meaner than itself Gold 
hunting and lust were the two passions for which the 
Spaniards cared ; and the fate of the Indian women was 
only more dreadful than that of the men, who were ganged 
and chained to a labor in the mines which was only to 
cease with their lives, in a land where but a little before 
they had lived a free contented people, more innocent of 
crime than perhaps any people upon earth. If we can 
conceive what our own feelings would be — if, in the " de- 
velopment of the mammalia," some baser but more power- 
ful race than man were to appear upon this planet, and we 
and our wives and children at our own happy firesides 
were degraded from our freedom, and became to them 
w^hat the lower animals are to us, we can perhaps realize 
the feelings of the enslaved nations of Hispaniola. 



B76 EnglancCs Forgotten Worthies. 

As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes urged 
that men who do not deserve to be slaves will prefer death 
to the endurance of it ; and that if they prize their liberty, 
it is always in their power to assert it in the old Roman 
fashion. Tried even by so hard a rule, the Indians vindi- 
cated their right ; and, before the close of the sixteenth 
century, the entire group of the Western Islands in the 
hands of the Spaniards, containing, when Columbus dis- 
covered them, many millions of inhabitants, were left liter- 
ally desolate from suicide. Of the anecdotes of this terri- 
ble self-immolation, as they were then known in England, 
here are a few out of many. 

The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary 
method. A Yucatan cacique, who was forced with his old 
subjects to labor in the mines, at last "calling those miners 
into an house, to the number of ninety-five, he thus de- 
bateth with them " : — 

" My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to live 
any longer under so cruel a servitude ? Let us now go unto the 
perpetual seat of our ancestors, for we shall there have rest from 
these intolerable cares and grievances which we endure under the 
subjection of the unthankful. Go ye before ; I will presently fol- 
low you." Having so spoken, he held out whole handfuls of those 
leaves which take away life, prepared for the purpose, and giving 
every one part thereof, being kindled to suck up the fume ; who 
obeyed his command, the king and his chief kinsmen reserving 
the last place for themselves. 

We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons will 
see a crime in this sad and stately leave-taking of a life 
which it was no longer possible to bear with unbroken 
hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who, with Spaniards 
before him as an evidence of the fruits which their creed 
brought forth, deliberately exchanged for it the old religion 
of his country, which could sustain him in an action of 
such melancholy grandeur. But the Indians did not al- 
ways reply to their oppressors with escaping passively be- 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 877 

yond their hands. Here is a story with matter in it for as 
rich a tragedy as OEdipus or Agamemnon, and in its stern 
and tremendous features, more nearly resembling them than 
any which were conceived even by Shakespeare. 

An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter of a 
Cuban cacique to be his mistress. She was with child by 
him, but, suspecting her of being engaged in some other 
intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden spits, not in- 
tending to kill her, but to terrify her ; and setting her be- 
fore the fire, he ordered that she should be turned by the 
servants of the kitchen. 

The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty thereof, and 
strange kind of torment, presently gave up the ghost. The ca- 
cique her father, understandhig the matter, took thh'ty of his men 
and went to the house of the captain, who was then absent, and 
slew his wife, whom he had married after that wicked act commit- 
ted, and the women who were companions of the wife, and her 
servants every one. Then shutting the door of the house, and 
putting fire under it, he burnt himself and all his companions that 
assisted him, together with the captain's dead family and goods. 

This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale of 
wrath and revenge, which in sober dreadful truth enacted 
itself upon this earth, and remains among the eternal rec- 
ords of the doings of mankind upon it. As some relief to 
its most terrible features, we follow it with a story which 
has a touch in it of diabolical humor. 

The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus un- 
prosperously out of their grasp, set themselves to find a 
remedy for so desperate a disease, and were swift to avail 
themselves of any weakness, mental or bodily, through 
which to retain them in life. One of these proprietors 
being informed that a number of his people intended to 
kill themselves on a certain day, at a particular spot, and 
knowing by experience that they were too likely to do it, 
presented himself there at the time which had been fixed 
upon, and telling the Indians when they arrived that he 



378 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

knew their intention, and that it was vain for them to at- 
tempt to keep any thing a secret from him, he ended with 
saying, that he had come there to kill himself with them ; 
that as he had used them ill in this world, he might use 
them worse in the next ; " with which he did dissuade 
them presently from their purpose." With what efficacy 
such believers in the immortality of the soul were likely to 
recommend either their faith or their God ; rather, how 
terribly all the devotion and all the earnestness with which 
the poor priests who followed in the wake of the conquer- 
ors labored to recommend it were shamed and paralyzed, 
they themselves too bitterly lament. 

It was idle to send out governor after governor with or- 
ders to stay such practices. They had but to arrive on 
the scene to become infected with the same fever ; or if 
any remnant of Castilian honor, or any faintest echoes of 
the faith which they professed, still flickered in a few of 
the best and noblest, they could but look on with folded 
hands in ineffectual mourning ; they could do nothing 
without soldiers, and the soldiers were the worst offenders. 
Hispaniola became a desert : the gold was in the mines, 
and there were no slaves left remaining to extract it. One 
means which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the 
vacancy, brought about an incident which in its piteous pa- 
thos exceeds any story we have ever heard. Crimes and 
criminals are swept away by time, Nature finds an antidote 
for their poison, and they and their ill consequences alike 
are blotted out and perish. If we do not forgive the vil- 
lain, at least we cease to hate him, as it grows more clear 
to us that he injures none so deeply as himself But the 
67)f)uo^r]<i KaKtrt. the enormous wickedness by which hu- 
manity itself has been outraged and disgraced, we cannot 
forgive ; we cannot cease to hate that ; the years roll away 
but the tints of it remain on the pages of history, deep 
and horrible as the day on which they were entered 
there. 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 379 

When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion of the 
Yucatan islanders concerning the souls of their departed, which, 
after their sins purged in the cold northern mountains should pass 
into the south, to the intent that, leaving their own country of 
their own accord, they might suffer themselves to be brought to 
Hispaniola, they did persuade those poor wretches, that they came 
from those places where they should see their parents and chil- 
dren, and all their kindred and friends that were dead, and 
should enjoy all kinds of delights with the embracements and frui- 
tion of all beloved beings. And they, being infected and pos- 
sessed with these crafty and subtle imaginations, singing and re- 
joicing left their country, and followed vain and idle hope. But 
when they saw that they were deceived, and neither met their 
parents nor any that they desired, but were compelled to undergo 
grievous sovereignty and command, and to endure cruel and ex- 
treme labor, they either slew themselves, or, choosing to famish, 
gave up their fair spirits, being persuaded by no reason or vio- 
lence to take food. So these miserable Yucatans came to their 
end. • 

It was once more as it was in the days of the Apostles. 
The New World was first offered to the holders of the old 
traditions. They were the husbandmen first chosen for the 
new vineyard, and blood and desolation were the only fruits 
which they reared upon it. In their hands it was becoming 
a kingdom, not of God, but of the devil, and a sentence of 
blight went out against them and against their works. How 
fatally it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish Amer- 
ica bear witness. We need not follow further the history 
of their dealings with the Indians. For their colonies, a 
fatality appears to have followed all attempts at Catholic 
colonization. Like shoots from an old decavino- tree which 
no skill and no care can rear, they were planted, and for a 
while they might seem to grow ; but their life was never 
more than a lingering death, a failure, which to a thinking 
person would outweigh in the arguments against Catholi- 
cism whole libraries of faultless catenas, and a consensus pa- 
trum unbroken through fifteen centuries for the supremacy 
of St. Peter. 



380 UnglancTs Forgotten Worthies, 

There is no occasion to look for superstitious c:ui3e^ to 
explain the phenomenon. The Catholic faith had ceased " 
to be the faith of the large mass of earnest thinking capable 
persons ; and to those who can best do the work, all work in 
this world sooner or later is committed. America was the 
natural home for Protestants ; persecuted at home, they 
sought a place where they might worship God in their own 
way, without danger of stake or gibbet, and the French 
Huguenots, as afterwards the English Puritans, early found 
their way there. The fate of a party of Coligny's people, 
who had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these stories, 
illustrating, as it does in the highest degree, the wrath and 
fury with which the passions on both sides were boiling. 
A certain John Ribault, with about 400 companions, had 
emigrated to Florida. They were quiet, inoffensive people, 
and lived in peace there several years, cultivating the soil, 
building villages, and on the best possible terms with the 
natives. Spain was at the time at peace with France ; we 
are, therefore, to suppose that it was in pursuance of the 
great crusade, in which they might feel secure of the secret, 
if not the confessed, sympathy of the Guises, that a power- 
ful Spanish fleet bore down upon this settlement. The 
French made no resistance, and they were seized and 
flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees, with 
an inscription suspended over them, " Not as Frenchmen, 
but as heretics." At Paris all was sweetness and silence. 
The settlement was tranquilly surrendered to the same 
men who had made it the scene of their atrocity ; and two 
years later, 500 of the very Spaniards who had been most 
active in the murder were living there in peaceable posses- 
sion, in two forts which their relation with the natives had 
obliged them to build. It was well that there were other 
Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the Court had 
not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies to do 
what was right without consulting it. A certain priva- 
teer, named Dominique de Gourges, secretly armed and 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 381 

equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing across the At- 
lantic, and in two days collecting a strong party of Indians, 
he came down suddenly upon the forts, and, taking them 
by storm, slew or afterwards hanged every man he found 
there, leaving their bodies on the trees on which they had 
hanged the Huguenots, with their own inscription reversed 
against them, — "Not as Spaniards, but as murderers." 
For which exploit, well deserving of all honest men's 
praise, Dominique de Gourges had to fly his country for 
his life ; and, coming to England, was received with honor- 
able welcome by Elizabeth. 

It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst such 
scenes as these, that the English navigators appeared along 
the shores of South America, as the armed soldiers of the 
Reformation, and as the avengers of humanity. As their 
enterprise was grand and lofty, so for the most part was the 
manner in which they bore themselves worthy of it. They 
were no nation of saints, in the modern sentimental sense 
of that word ; they were prompt, stern men — more ready 
ever to strike an enemy than to parley with him ; and, 
private adventurers as they all were, it was natural enough 
that private rapacity and private badness should be found 
among them as among other mortals. Every Englishman 
who had the means was at liberty to fit out a ship or ships, 
and if he could produce tolerable vouchers for himself, 
received at once a commission from the Court. The bat- 
tles of England were fought by her children, at their own 
risk and cost, and they were at liberty to repay themselves 
the expense of their expeditions by plundering at the cost 
of the national enemy. Thus, of course, in a mixed world, 
there were found mixed marauding crews of scoundrels, 
who played the game which a century later was played 
with such effect by the pirates of the Tortugas. Negro 
hunters too, there were, and a bad black slave-trade — in 
which Elizabeth herself, being hard driven for money, did 
not disdain to invest her capital ; but on the whole, and 



382 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

in the war with the Spaniards, as in the war with the ele- 
ments, the conduct and character of the English sailors, 
considering what they were and the work which they were 
sent to do, present us all through that age with such a pict- 
ure of gallantry, disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, 
as has never been overmatched ; the more remarkable, as 
it was the fruit of no drill or discipline, no tradition, no 
system, no organized training, but was the free native 
growth of a noble virgin soil. 

Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the 
crew and the officers to meet and arrange among them- 
selves a series of articles of conduct, to which they bound 
themselves by a formal agreement, the entire body itself 
undertaking to see to their observance. It is quite possible 
that strong religious profession, and even sincere profession, 
might be accompanied, as it was in the Spaniards, with 
every thing most detestable. It is not sufficient of itself to 
prove that their actions would correspond with it, but it is 
one among a number of evidences ; and coming as most of 
these men come before us, with hands clear of any blood 
but of fair and open enemies, their articles may pass at 
least as indications of what they were. 

Here we have a few instances : — 

Richard Hawkins's ship's company was, as he himself 
informs us, an unusually loose one. Nevertheless, we find 
them " gathered together every morning and evening to 
serve God ; " and a fire on board, which only Hawkins's 
presence of mind prevented from destroying ship and crew 
together, was made use of by the men as an occasion to 
banish swearing out of the ship. 

With a general consent of all our company, it was ordained that 
there should be a palmer or ferula which should be in the keeping 
of him who was taken with an oath ; and that he who had the 
palmer should give to every one that he took swearing, a palmada 
with it and the ferula ; and whosoever at the time of evening or 
morning prayer was found to have the palmer, should have three 



England^s Forgotten Woi^thies. 383 

blows given him by tlie captain or the master ; and that he should 
still be bound to free himself by taking another, or else to run in 
danger of continuing the penalty, which, being executed a few 
days, reformed the vice, so that in three days together was not one 
oath heard to be sworn. 

The regulations for Luke Fox's voyage commence 
thus : — 

For as much as the good success and prosperity of every action 
doth consist in the due service and glorifying of God, knowing that 
not only our being and preservation, but the prosperity of all our 
actions and enterprises do immediately depend on His Almighty 
goodness and mercy ; it is provided — 

First, that all the company, as well officers as others, shall duly 
repair every day twice at the call of the bell to hear public 
prayers to be read, such as are authorized by the Church, and that 
in a godly and devout manner, as good Christians ought. 

Secondly, that no man shall swear by the name of God, or use 
any profane oath, or blaspheme His holy name. 

To symptoms such as these, we cannot but assign a very 
different value when they are the spontaneous growth of 
common minds, unstimulated by sense of propriety or rules 
of the service, or other official influence, lay or ecclesiastic, 
from what attaches to the somewhat similar ceremonials in 
which, among persons whose position is conspicuous, im- 
portant enterprises are now and then inaugurated. 

We have said as much as we intend to say of the treat- 
ment by the Spaniards of the Indian women. Sir Walter 
Raleigh is commonly represented by historians as rather 
defective, if he was remarkable at all, on the moral side of 
his character. Yet Raleigh can declare proudly, that all 
the time he was on the Orinoko, " neither by force nor 
other means had any of his men intercourse with any 
woman there ; " and the narrator of the incidents of Ra- 
leigh's last voyage acquaints his correspondent " v/ith some 
particulars touching the government of the fleet, which, 
although other men in their voyages doubtless in some 



384 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

measure olDserved, yet in all the great volumes which have 
been written touching voyages, there is no precedent of so 
godly severe and martial government, which not only in 
itself is laudable and worthy of imitation, but is also fit to 
be written and engraven on every man's soul that coveteth 
to do honor to his country." 

Once more, the modern theory of Drake is, as we said 
above, that he was a gentleman-like pirate on a large scale, 
who is indebted for the place which he fills in history to 
the indistinct ideas of right and wrong prevailing in the 
unenlightened age in which he lived, and who therefore 
demands all the toleration of our own enlarged humanity 
to allow him to remain there. Let us see how the following 
incident can be made to coincide with this hypothesis : — 

A few days after clearing the Channel on his first great 
voyage, he fell in with a small Spanish ship, which he took 
for a prize. He committed the care of it to a certain Mr. 
Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and personally very 
dear to him, and this second vessel was to follow him as a 
tender. 

In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second 
smaller ship was often indispensable to success but many 
finely intended enterprises were ruined by the cowardice 
of the officers to whom such ships were intrusted ; who 
shrank as danger thickened, and again and again took ad- 
vantage of darkness or heavy weather to make sail for 
England and forsake their commander. Hawkins twice 
suffered in this way ; so did Sir Humfrey Gilbert ; and, 
althouoh Drake's own kind feelinor for his old friend has 
prevented him from leaving an. exact account of his of- 
fense, we gather from the scattered hints which are let fall, 
that he, too, was meditating a similar piece of treason. 
However, it may or may not have been thus. But when at 
Port St. Julien, " our General," says one of the crew, — 

Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas 
Doughtie, and found them not to be such as he looked for, but 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 385 

tending rather to contention or mutiny, or some other disorder, 
whereby, without redress, the success of the voyage might greatly 
have been hazarded. Whereupon the company was called to- 
gether and made acquainted with the particulars of the cause, 
which were found, partly by Mr. Doughtie's own confession, and 
partly bj the evidence of the fact, to be true, which, when our 
General saw, although his private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he 
then, in the presence of us all, sacredly protested) was great, yet 
the care which he had of the state of the voyage, of the expecta- 
tion of Her Majesty, and of the honor of his country, did more 
touch him, as indeed it ought, than the private respect of one man; 
so that the cause being thoroughly heard, and all things done in 
good order as near as might be to the course of our law in Eng- 
land, it was concluded that Mr. Doughtie should receive punish- 
ment according to the quality of the offense. And he, seeing no 
remedy but patience for himself, desired before his death to receive 
the communion, which he did at the hands of Mr. Fletcher, our 
minister, and our General himself accompanied him in that holy 
action, which, being done, and the place of execution made ready, 
he, having embraced our General, and taken leave of all the com- 
pany, with prayers for the Queen's Majesty and our realm, in 
quiet sort laid his head to the block, where he ended his life. This 
being done, our General made divers speeches to the whole com- 
pany, persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our 
voyage, and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every man 
the next Sunday following to prepare himself to receive the com- 
munion, as Christian brethren and friends ought to do, which was 
done in very reverent sort, and so with good contentment every 
man went about his business. 

The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing 
from any comment which we might offer upon it. The 
crew of a common English ship organizing, of their own 
free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment hall more 
grand and awful than any most elaborate law court, is not 
to be reconciled with the pirate theory. Drake, it is true, 
appropriated and brought home a million and a half of 
Spanish treasure, while England and Spain were at peace. 
He took that treasure because for many years the officers 
25 



386 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

of the Inquisition had made free at their pleasure with the 
lives and oroods of Eno^lish merchants and seamen. The 
king of Spain, when appealed to, had replied that he had 
no power over the Holy House ; and it was necessary to 
make the king of Spain, or the Inquisition, or whoever 
were the parties responsible, feel that they could not play 
their pious pranks with impunity. When Drake seized 
the bullion at Panama, he sent word to the viceroy that he 
should now learn to respect the properties of English sub- 
jects ; and he added, that if four English sailors, who were 
prisoners in Mexico, were molested, he would execute 2000 
Spaniards and send the viceroy their heads. Spain and 
England were at peace, but Popery and Protestantism 
were at war — deep, deadly, and irreconcilable. 

Wherever we find them they are still the same. In the 
courts of Japan or of China ; fighting Spaniards in the 
Pacific, or prisoners among the Algerines ; founding colo- 
nies which by and by were to grow into enormous Trans- 
atlantic republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the fierce 
latitudes of the Polar seas, — they are the same indomi- 
table God-fearing men whose life was one great liturgy. 
" The ice was strong, but God was stronger," says one of 
Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day among 
the icebergs, not waiting for God to come down and split 
the ice for them, but toiling through the long hours, him- 
self and the rest fending off the vessel with poles and 
planks, with death glaring at them out of the rocks. Ice- 
Bergs were strong, Spaniards were strong, and storms, and 
corsairs, and rocks, and reefs, which no chart had then 
noted — they were all strong ; but God was stronger, and 
that was all which they cared to know. 

Out of the vast number of illustrations it is difficult to 
make wise selections, but the attention floats loosely over 
generalities, and only individual instances can seize it and 
hold it fast. We shall attempt to bring our readers face to 
face with some of these men ; not, of course, to write their 



England^s Forgotten Worthies. 387 

biographies, but to sketch the details of a few scenes, in 
the hope that they may tempt those under whose eyes they 
may fall to look for themselves to complete the perfect 
figure. 

Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once 
among the most important harbors in England, on a pro- 
jecting angle of land which runs out into river at the 
head of one of its most beautiful reaches, there has stood 
for some centuries the Manor House of Greenaway. The 
water runs deep all the way to it from the sea, and the 
largest vessels may ride with safety within a stone's throw 
of the windows. In the latter half of the sixteenth cen- 
tury there must have met, in the hall of this mansion, a party 
as remarkable as could have been found any where in Eng- 
land. Plumfrey and Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, 
Walter Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in 
the reaches of Long Stream ; in the summer evenings 
doubtless rowing down with the tide to the port, and won- 
dering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows of the 
ships wliich thronged it ; or climbing on board, and listen- 
ing, with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new 
earth beyond the sunset. And here in later life, matured 
men, whose boyish dreams had • become heroic action, they 
used again to meet in the intervals of quiet, and the rock 
is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked 
the first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of whom we 
shall presently speak more closely, could not fail to have 
made a fourth at these meetings. A sailor-boy of Sand- 
wich, the adjoining parish, John Davis, showed early a 
genius which could not have escaped the eye of such 
neighbors, and in the atmosphere of Greenaway he learned 
to be as noble as the Gilberts, and as tender and delicate 
as Raleigh. Of this party, for the present we confine our- 
selves to the host and owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted 
afterwards by Elizabeth. Led by the scenes of his childhood 
to the sea and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind 



388 Ungland's Forgotten Worthies. 

unfolded, to study his profession scientifically, we find him 
as soon as he was old enough to think for himself, or make 
others listen to him, " amending the great errors of naval 
sea-cards, Avhose common fault is to make the degree of 
longitude in every latitude of one common bigness ; " in- 
venting instruments for taking observations, studying the 
form of the earth, and convincing himself that there was 
a northwest passage, and studying the necessities of his 
country, and discovering the remedies for them in coloniza- 
tion and extended markets for home manufactures. Gil- 
bert was examined before the Queen's Majesty and the 
Privy Council, and the record of his examination he has 
himself left to us in a paper which he afterwards drew 
up, and strange enough reading it is. The most admi- 
rable conclusions stand side by side with the wildest con- 
jectures. 

Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove 
that the ocean runs round the three old continents, and 
that America therefore is necessarily an island. The Gulf 
Stream, which he had carefully observed, eked out by a 
theory of the primum mohile, is made to demonstrate a 
channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's Straits 
in the south, Gilbert believing, in common with almost 
every one of his day, that these straits were the only open- 
ing into the Pacific, and the land to the south was un- 
broken to the Pole. He prophesies a market in the East 
for our manufactured linen and calicos : — 

The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth in Hester, 
where the pomp is expressed of the great King of India, Ahasue- 
rus, who matched the colored clothes wherewith his houses and 
tents were appareled, with gold and silver, as part of his greatest 
treasure. 

These and other such arguments were the best analysis 
which Sir Humfrey had to offer of the spirit which he felt 
to be working in him. We may think what we please of 
them ; but we can have but one thought of the great grand 



Ungland^s Forgotten Worthies. 389 

words with which the memorial concludes, and they alone 
would explain the love which Elizabeth bore him : — 

Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any laud- 
able and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure or idleness we 
purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame abideth 
forever. 

Give me leave, therefore, without offense, always to live and die 
in this mind : that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear or 
danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honor, 
seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal, 
wherefore in this behalf rnutare vel timere sperno. 

Two voyages which he imdertook at his own cost, which 
shattered his fortune, and failed, as they naturally might, 
since inefficient help or mutiny of subordinates, or other 
disorders, are inevitable conditions under which more or 
less orreat men must be content to see their crreat thouorhts 
mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments, did not 
dishearten him, and in June, 1583, a last fleet of five ships 
sailed from the port of Dartmouth, with commission from 
the queen to discover and take possession from latitude 45° 
to 50° North — a voyage not a little noteworthy, there be- 
ing planted in the course of it the first English colony west 
of the Atlantic. Elizabeth had a foreboding that she 
would never see him again. She sent him a jewel as a last 
token of her favor, and she desired Raleigh to have his 
picture taken before he went. 

The history of the voyage was written by a Mr. Edward 
Hayes, of Dartmouth, one of the principal actors in it, and 
as a composition it is more remarkable for fine writing 
than any very commendable thought in the author. But 
Sir Humfrey's nature shines through the infirmity of his 
chronicler ; and in the end, indeed, Mr. Hayes himself is 
subdued into a better mind. He had lost money by the 
voyage, and we will hope his higher nature was only un- 
der a temporary eclipse. The fleet consisted (it is well to 
observe the ships and the size of them) of the Delight, 



390 England's Forgotteyi Worthies. 

120 tons ; the bark Raleigh, 200 tons (this ship deserted 
off the Land's End) ; the Golden Hinde and the Sivcdlow, 
40 tons each ; and the Squirrel, which was called the 
frigate, 10 tons. For the uninitiated in such matters, 
we may add, that if in a vessel the size of the last, a 
member of the Yacht Club would consider that he had 
earned a club- room immortality if he had ventured a 
run in the depth of summer from Cowes to the Channel 
Islands. 

We were in all (says Mr. Hayes) 260 men, among whom we 
had of every faculty good choice. Besides, for solace of our own 
people, and allurement of the savages, we were provided of music 
in good variety, not omitting the least toys, as morris-dancers, 
hobby-horses, and May-like conceits to delight the savage people. 

The expedition reached Newfoundland without accident. 
St. John's was taken possession of, and a colony left there ; 
and Sir Humfrey then set out exploring along the American 
coast to the south, he himself doing all the work in his lit- 
tle 10-ton cutter, the service being too dangerous for the 
larger vessels to venture on. One of these had remained 
at St. John's. He was now accompanied only by the De- 
light and the Golden Hinde, and these two keeping as 
near the shore as they dared, he spent what remained of 
the summer examining every creek and bay, marking the 
soundings, taking the bearings of the possible harbors, and 
risking his life, as every hour he was obliged to risk it in 
such a service, in thus leading, as it were, the forlorn hope 
in the conquest of the New World. How dangerous it was 
we shall presently see. It was towards the end of August. 

The evening was fair and pleasant, yet not without token of 
storm to ensue, and most part of this Wednesday night, like the 
swan that singeth before her death, they in the Delight contin- 
ued in sounding of drums and trumpets and fifes, also winding the 
cornets and hautboys, and in the end of their jollity left with the 
battell and ringins; of doleful knells. 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 391 

Two clays after came the storm ; the DeligJtt struck 
ujDOii a bank, and went down in sight of the other vessels, 
which were unable to render her any help. Sir Humfrey's 
papers, among other things, were all lost in her ; at the 
time considered by him an irreparable misfortune. But 
it was little matter : he was never to need them. The 
Golden Hinde and the Squirrel were now left alone of 
the five ships. The provisions were running short, and the 
summer season was closing. Both crews were on short 
allowance ; and with much difficulty Sir Humfrey was pre- 
vailed upon to be satisfied for the present with what he 
had done, and to lay off for England. 

So upon Saturday, in the afternoon, the 31st of August, we 
changed our course, and returned back for England, at which 
very instant, even in winding about, there passed along between 
us and the land, which we noAV forsook, a very lion, to our seem- 
ing, in shape, hair, and color ; not swimming after the manner of 
a beast by moving of his feet, but rather sliding upon the water 
with his whole body, except his legs, in sight, neither yet diving 
under and again rising as the manner is of whales, porpoises, and 
other fish, but confidently showing himself without hiding, not- 
withstanding that we presented ourselves in open view and gest- 
ure to amaze him. Thus he passed along, turning his head to 
and fro, yawning and gaping wide, with ougly demonstration of 
long teeth and glaring eyes; and to bidde us farewell, coming 
right against the Hinde, he sent forth a horrible voice, roaring 
and bellowing as doth a lion, which spectacle we all beheld so far 
as we were able to discern the same, as men prone to wonder at 
every strange thing. What opinion others had thereof, and 
chiefly the General himself, I forbear to deliver. But he took it 
for Bonum Omen, rejoicing that he was to war against such an 
enemy, if it were the devil. 

We have no doubt that he did think it was the devil ; 
men in those days believing really that evil was more than 
a principle or a necessary accident, and that in all their 
labor for God and for right, they must make their account 
to have to fight with the devil in his proper person. But 



392 England^s Forgotten Worthies. 

if we are to call it superstition, and if this were no devil in 
the form of a roaring lion, but a mere great seal or sea- 
lion, it is a more innocent superstition to impersonate so 
real a power, and it requires a bolder heart to rise up 
against it and defy it in its living terror, than to sublimate 
it away into a philosophical principle, and to forget to bat- 
tle with it in speculating on its origin and nature. But to 
follow the brave Sir Humfrey, whose work of fighting with 
the devil was now over, and who was passing to his reward. 
The 2d of September the General came on board the 
Golden Hinde "■ to make merry with us." He greatly de- 
plored the loss of his books and papers, but he was full 
of confidence from what he had seen, and talked with 
eagerness and warmth of the new expedition for the fol- 
lowing spring. Apocryphal gold-mines still occupying the 
minds of Mr. Hayes and others, they were persuaded that 
Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some such discovery 
which he had secretly made, and they tried hard to extract 
it from him. They could make nothing, however, of his 
odd, ironical answers, and their sorrow at the catastrophe 
which followed is sadly blended with disappointment that 
such a secret should have perished. Sir Humfrey doubt- 
less saw America with other eyes than theirs, and gold- 
mines richer than California in its huge rivers and sa- 
vannas. 

Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold), (contin- 
ues Mr. Hayes), to God, who only knoweth the truth thereof, I 
will hasten to the end of this tragedy, which must be knit up in 
the person of our General, and as it was God's ordinance upon 
him, even so the vehement persuasion of his friends could noth- 
ing avail to divert him from his willful resolution of going in his 
frigate ; and when he was entreated by the captain, master, and 
others, his well-wishers in the Hinde, not to venture, this was his 
answer — " I will not forsake my little company going homewards, 
with whom I have passed so many storms and perils." 

Two thirds of the way home they met foul weather and 



JEngland's Forgotten Worthies. 393 

terrible seas, "breaking short and pyramidwise." Men 
who had all their lives " occupied the sea " had never seen 
it more outrageous. " We had also upon our mainyard an 
apparition of a little fier by night, which seamen do call 
Castor and Pollux." 

Monday, the ninth of September, in the afternoon, the frigate 
was near cast away oppressed by waves, but at that time recov- 
ered, and giving forth signs of joy, the General, sitting abaft with 
a book in bis liand, cried out unto us in the Hinde so often as 
we did approach within hearing, " We are as near to heaven by 
sea as by land," reiterating the same speech, well beseeming a 
soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify that he was. The 
same Monday night, about twelve of the clock, or not long after, 
the irigate being ahead of us in the Golden Hinde, suddenly 
her lights were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the 
sight ; and witlial our watch cried, " The General was cast away," 
w-hich was too true. 

Thus faithfully (concludes Mr. Hayes, in some degree rising 
above himself) I have related this story, wherein some spark of 
the knight's virtues, though he be extinguished, may happily ap- 
pear ; he remaining resolute to a purpose honest and godly as was 
this, to discover, possess, and reduce unto the service of God and 
Christian piety, those remote and heathen countries of America. 
Such is the infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth 
good, that fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these North- 
western lands (as has it not grown ?), and the crosses, turmoils, 
and afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of the voy- 
age, did correct the intemperate humors which before we noted to 
be in this gentleman, and made unsavory and less delightful his 
other manifold virtues. 

Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto the image of 
God, so it pleased the Divine will to resume him unto Himself, 
whither both his and every other high and noble mind li .vc al- 
ways aspired. 

Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert ; still in the prime of his 
years when the Atlantic swallowed him. Like the gleam 
of a landscape lit suddenly for a moment by the lightning, 
these few scenes flash down to us across the centurio::; ; 



394 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

but what a life must that have been of which this was the 
conclusion ! We have glimjDses of him a few years earlier, 
when he won his spurs in Ireland — won them by deeds 
which to us seem terrible in their ruthlessness, but which 
won the applause of Sir Henry Sidney as too high for 
praise or even reward. Checkered like all of us with lines 
of light and darkness, he was nevertheless one of a race 
which has ceased to be. We look round for them, and we 
can hardly believe that the same blood is flowing in our 
veins. Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps as they, 
but the high moral grace which made bravery and strength 
so beautiful is departed from us forever. 

Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait paint- 
ing ; but we must find room for another of that Greena- 
way party whose nature was as fine as that of Gilbert, and 
who intellectually was more largely gifted. The latter was 
drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on 
his first voyage into the Polar seas ; and twice subse- 
quently lie went again, venturing in small, ill-equipped ves- 
sels of thirty or forty tons into the most dangerous seas. 
These voyages were as remarkable for their success as for 
the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's 
epitaph is written on the map of the world, where his name 
still remains to commemorate his discoveries. Brave as 
he was, he is distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite 
sweetness of nature, which, from many little facts of his 
life, seems to have affected every one with whom he came 
in contact in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the 
love of Master Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with 
him, without other hope or motion ; we find silver bullets 
cast to shoot him in a mutiny ; the hard rude natures of 
the nuitineers being awed by something in his carriage 
which was not like that of a common man. He has writ- 
ten the account of one of his northern voyages himself; 
one of those, by the by, which the Hakluyt Society have 
mutilated ; and there is an imaginative beauty in it, and a 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 395 

rich delicacy of expression, which is called out in him by 
the first sight of strange lands and things and people. 

To show what he was, we should have preferred, if pos- 
sible, to have taken the story of his expedition into the 
South Seas, in which, under circumstances of singular dif- 
ficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under whom he had 
sailed ; and after inconceivable trials from famine, mutiny, 
and storm, ultimately saved himself and his ship, and such 
of the crew as had chosen to submit to his orders. But it 
is a long history, and will not admit of being curtailed. 
As an instance of the stuff of which it was composed, he 
ran back in the black night in a gale of wind through the 
Straits of Magellan, hy a chart ivhich he had made ivith the 
eye in passing up. His anchors were lost or broken ; the 
cables were parted. He could not bring up the ship ; 
there was nothing for it but to run, and he carried her 
safe through along a channel often not three miles broad, 
sixty miles from end to end, and twisting like the reaches 
of a river. 

For the present, however, we are forced to content our- 
selves with a few sketches out of the northwest voyages. 
Here is one, for instance, which shows how an English- 
man could deal with the Indians. Davis had landed at 
Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country exploring. On 
his return he found his crew loud in complaints of the 
thievish propensities of the natives, and urgent to have an 
example made of some of them. On the next occasion he 
fired a gun at them with blank cartridge ; but their nature 
was still too strong for them. 

Seeing iron (he says), they could in no case forbear stealing ; 
which, when I perceived, it did but minister to me occasion of 
laughter to see their simplicity, and I willed that they should not 
be hardly used, but that our company should be more diligent to 
keep their things, supposing it to be very hard in so short a time 
to make them know their evils. 

In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of ad- 



896 EnglancVs Forgotten Worthies, 

ministering a lesson to them of a more wholesome kind 
than could be given with gunpowder and bullets. Like 
the rest of his countrymen, he believed the savage Indians 
in their idolatries to be worshipers of the devil. " They 
are witches," he says ; " they have images in great store, 
and use many kinds of enchantments." And these en- 
chantments they tried on one occasion to put in force 
against himself and his crew. 

Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them made a 
long oration, and then kindled a fire, into which, with many 
strange words and gestures, he put divers things, which we sup- 
posed to be a sacrifice. Myself and certain of my company 
standing by, they desired us to go into the smoke. ' I desired them 
to go into the smoke, which they would by no means do. I then 
took one of them and thrust him into the smoke, and willed one 
of my company to tread out the fire, and spurn it into the sea, 
which was done to show them that we did contemn their sorceries. 

It is a very English story — exactly what a modern 
Englishman would do ; only, perhaps, not believing that 
there was any real devil in the case, which makes a differ- 
ence. However, real or not real, after seeing him patiently 
put up with such an injury, w^e will hope the poor Green- 
lander had less respect for the devil than formerly. 

Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north- 
west, and in lat. 63° fell in with a barrier of ice, which 
he coasted for thirteen days without finding an opening. 
The very sight of an iceberg was new to all his crew ; and 
the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer, becom- 
ing compassed with ice, — 

The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted— whereupon, 
very orderly, with good discretion, they entreated me to regard 
the safety of mine own life, as well as the preservation of theirs ; 
and that I should not, through over-boldness, leave their widows 
and fatherless children to give me bitter curses. 

Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His Divine Maj- 
esty to move my heart to prosecute that which I hope shall be to 
His glory, and to the contentation of every Christian mind. 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 39T 

He had two vessels — one of some burden, the other a 
pitniace of thirty tons. The result of the counsel which 
he had sought was, that he made over his own large vessel 
to such as wished to return, and himself, " thinking it bet- 
ter to die with honor than to return with infamy," went on 
with such volunteers as would follow him, in a poor leaky 
cutter, up the sea now in commemoration of that adven- 
ture called Davis's Straits. He ascended 4° north of the 
furthest known point, among storms and icebergs, when 
the long days and twilight nights alone saved him from 
being destroyed, and, coasting back along the American 
shore, he discovered Hudson's Straits, supposed then to be 
the long-desired entrance into the Pacific. This exploit 
drew the attention of Walsingham, and by him Davis was 
presented to Burleigh, " who was also pleased to show him 
great encouragement." If either these statesmen or Eliz- 
abeth had been twenty years younger, his name would 
have filled a larger space in history than a small corner of 
the map of the world ; but if he was employed at all in 
the last years of the century, no vates sacer has been found 
to celebrate his work, and no clew is left to guide us. He 
disappears ; a cloud falls over him. He is known to have 
commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas, and to 
have returned five times from India. But the details 
are all lost, and accident has only parted the clouds for a 
moment to show us the mournful setting with which he, 
too, went down upon the sea. 

In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in 
1604, he fell in with a crew of Japanese, whose ship had 
been burnt, drifting at sea, without provisions, in a leaky 
junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but he did not 
choose to leave them to so wretched a death, and took 
them on board ; and in a few hours, watching their oppor- 
tunity, they murdered him. 

As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no dif- 
ference ; it was the chance of the sea, and the ill reward 



398 England* § Forgotten Worthies. 

of a humane action — a melancholy end for such a man — ■ 
like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like on 
the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl or am- 
buscade. But so it was with all these men. They were 
cut off in the flower of their days, and few of them laid 
their bones in the seiDulchres of their fathers. They knew 
the service which they had chosen, and they did not ask 
the wages for which they had not labored. Life with them 
was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to 
duty, and what their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful 
is old age — beautiful is the slow-dropping mellow autumn 
of a rich glorious summer. In the old man. Nature has 
fulfilled her work ; she loads him with her blessings ; she 
fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life ; and surrounded 
by his children and his children's children, she rocks him 
softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with bless- 
ings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful. It is 
beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is another life, 
hard, rough, and thorny, trodden " with bleeding feet and 
aching brow ; the life of which the cross is the symbol ; 
a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave ; which 
the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won ; and — 
strange that it should be so — this is the highest life of 
man. Look back along the great names of history ; there 
is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom 
it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth 

— whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, 
warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves 

— one and all, their fate has been the same — the same 
bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And so it was 
with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. 
Their life was a long battle, either with the elements or 
with men ; and it was enough for them to fulfill their work, 
and to pass away in the hour when God had nothing more 
to bid them do. They did not complain, and why should 
we complain for them ? Peaceful life was not what they 



England's Forgotten Worthies. 399 

desired, and an honorable death had no terrors for them. 
Theirs was the old Grecian spirit, and the great heart of 
the Theban poet lived again in them : — 

©avelv 5' oiaiv avdyKt], ti /ce ris aucauv/xou 
yripas iv (TkStw KaOrjiJ-evos €\\/ol fxdrav, 
airavTuv Ka\uv afi/xopos '^ 

" Seeing," in Gilbert's own brave words, " that death is 
inevitable, and the fame of virtue is immortal ; wherefore 
in this behalf mutare vel timere spernor 

In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass into an 
element different from that in which we have been lately 
dwelling. The scenes in which Gilbert and Davis played 
out their high natures were of the kind which we call 
peaceful, and the enemies with which they contended were 
principally the ice and the wind, and the stormy seas and 
the dangers of unknown and savage lands. We shall close 
amidst the roar of cannon, and the wrath and rage of bat- 
tle. Hume, who alludes to the engagement which we are 
going to describe, speaks of it in a tone which shows that 
he looked at it as something portentous and prodigious ; 
as a thing to wonder at — but scarcely as deserving the 
admiration which we pay to actions properly within the 
scope of humanity — and as if the energy which was dis- 
played in it was like the unnatural strength of madness. 
He does not say this, but he appears to feel it ; and he 
scarcely would have felt it if he had cared more deeply to 
saturate himself with the temper of the age of which he 
was writing. At the time, all England and all the world 
rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror, though it 
was°but the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the 
Spanish people, it dealt a more deadly blow upon their 
fame and moral strength than the destruction of the Ar- 
mada itself; and in the direct results which arose from it, 
it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems 
to us, if the most glorious actions which are set like jewels 



400 England's Forgotten Worthies. 

in the history of mankind are weighed one against the 
other in the balance, — hardly will those 300 Spartans who 
in the summer morning sat " combing their long hair for 
death " in the passes of Thermopylae, have earned a more 
lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern 
Englishmen. 

In August, 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six Eng- 
lish line-of-battle ships, six victualers, and two or three 
pinnaces, was lying at anchor under the Island of Florez* 
Light in ballast and short of water, with half his men dis- 
abled by sickness, Howard was unable to pursue the ag- 
gressive purpose on which he had been sent out. Several 
of the ships' crews were on shore : the ships themselves 
" all pestered and rommaging," with every thing out of 
order. In this condition they were surprised by a Span- 
ish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war. Eleven out of the 
twelve English ships obeyed the signal of the admiral, to 
cut or weigh their anchors and escape as they might. 
The twelfth, the Revenge, was unable for the moment to 
follow. Of her crew of 190, ninety were sick on shore, 
and, from the position of the ship, there was some delay 
and difficulty in getting them on board. . The Revenge was- 
commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, of Bideford, a man 
well known in the Spanish seas, and the terror of the 
Spanish sailors ; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic 
stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Tal- 
bot or Cceur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened 
children with the sound of his name. " He was of great 
revenues, of his own inheritance," they said, " but of un- 
quiet mind, and greatly affected to wars ; " and from his 
uncontrollable propensities for blood-eating, he had volun- 
teered his services to the queen ; " of so hard a complex- 
ion was he, that I (John Huighen von Linschoten, who is 
our authority here, and who was with the Spanish fleet 
after the action) have been told by divers credible persons 
who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 401 

four glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his 
teeth and crush them in pieces and swallow them down." 
vSuch Grenville was to the Spaniard. To the English he 
was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned 
his back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that re- 
markable time for his constancy and daring. In this sur- 
prise at Florez he was in no haste to fly. He first saw all 
his sick on board and stowed away on the ballast ; and 
then, with no more than 100 men left him to fight and 
work the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it 
seemed at first, what he intended to do. The Spanish 
fleet were by this time on his weather bow, and he was 
persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's beautiful 
narrative, and follow it in Raleigh's words) '' to cut his 
main sail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the 
ship " : — 

But Sir Ricliard utterly refused to turn from the enemy, alleg- 
ing that he would rather choose to die than to dishonor himself, 
his country, and her Majesty's ship, persuading his company that 
he would pass through their two squadrons in spite of them, and 
enforce those of Seville to give him way ; which he performed 
upon diverse of the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang 
their luff, and fell under the lee of the Revenge. But the other 
course had been the better ; and might right well have been an- 
swered in so great an impossibility of prevailing : notwithstand- 
ing, out of the greatness of his mind, he could not be persuaded. 

The wind was light; the San Philip "a huge high- 
carged ship" of 1500 tons, came up to windward of him, 
and, taking the wind out of his sails, ran aboard him. 

After the Revenge was entangled with the San Philip, four 
others boarded her, two on her larboard and two on her star- 
board. The fight thus beginning at three o'clock in the after- 
noon continued very terrible all that evening. But the great 
San Philip, having received the lower tier of the Revenge, 
shifted herself with all diligence from her sides, utterly misliking 
her first entertainment. The Spanish ships were filled with sol- 
diers, in some 200, besides the mariners, in some 500, in others 
2G 



402 England''s Forgotten Worthies. 

800. In ours there were none at all, besides the mariners, but 
the servants of the commander and some few voluntary gentlemen 
only. After many interchanged volleys of great ordnance and 
small shot, the Spaniards deliberated to enter the Revenge, and 
made divers attempts, hoping to force her by the multitude of 
their armed soldiers and musketeers ; but were still repulsed 
again and again, and at all times beaten back into their own ship 
or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the George No- 
ble, of London, having received some shot through her by the 
Armadas, fell under the lee of tlie Revenge, and asked Sir 
Richard what he would command him ; but being one of the 
victualers, and of small force. Sir Richard bad him save himself 
and leave him to his fortune. 

This last was a little touch of gallantry, which we should 
be glad to remember with the honor due to the brave 
English sailor who commanded the George Noble ; but his 
name has passed away, and his action is an in memoriam^ 
on which time has effaced the writing. All that August 
nioht the fight continued, the stars rollino- over in their 
sad majesty, but unseen through the sulphurous clouds 
which hung over the scene. Ship after ship of the Span- 
iards came on upon the Revenge, " so that never less than 
two mighty galleons were at her side and aboard her," 
washing up like waves upon a rock, and falling foiled and 
shattered back amidst the roar of the artillery. Before 
morning fifteen several armadas had assailed her, and all 
in vain ; some had been sunk at her side ; and the rest, 
" so ill approving of their entertainment, that at break of 
day they were far more willing to hearken to a composi- 
tion, than hastily to make more assaults or entries." " But 
as the day increased," says Raleigh, "so our men de- 
creased ; and as the light grew more and more, by so 
much the more grew our discomfort, for none appeared in 
sight but enemies, save one small ship called the Pil- 
grim, commanded by Jacob Whiddon, who hovered all 
night to see the success, but in the morning, bearing with 
the Revenge, was hunted like a hare among many raven- 
ous hounds — but escaped." 



England's Forgotten Worthies, 403 

All the powder in the Revenge was now spent, all her 
pikes were broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed, and a 
great number of the rest wounded. Sir Richard, though 
badly hurt early in the battle, never forsook the deck till 
an hour before midnight ; and was then shot through the 
body while his wounds were being dressed, and again in 
the head. His surgeon was killed while attending on 
him ; the masts were lying over the side, the rigging cut 
or broken, the upper works all shot in pieces, and the ship 
herself, unable to move, was settling slowly in the sea ; 
the vast fleet of Spaniards lying round her in a ring, like 
dogs round a dying lion, and wary of approaching him in 
his last agony. Sir Richard, seeing that it was past hope* 
having fought for fifteen hours, and " having by estimation 
eight hundred shot of great artillery through him," " com- 
manded the master gunner, whom he knew to be a most 
resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby noth- 
ing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards ; 
seeing in so many hours they were not able to take her, 
having had above fifteen hours' time, above ten thousand 
•men, and fifty-three men-of-war to perform it withal ; and 
persuaded the company, or as many as he could induce, to 
yield themselves unto God and to the mercy of none else ; 
but as they had, like valiant resolute men, repulsed so 
many enemies, they should not now shorten the honor of 
their nation by prolonging their own lives for a few hours 
or a few days." 

The gunner and a few others consented. But such 
Satf^ovLr] apeTT] was more than could be expected of ordinary 
seamen. They had dared do all which did become men, 
and they were not more than men. Two Spanish ships 
had gone down, above 1500 of their crews were killed, and 
the Spanish Admiral could not induce any one of the rest 
of his fleet to board the Revenge again, " doubting lest 
Sir Richard would have blown up himself and them, 
knowing his dangerous disposition." Sir Richard lying 



404 Ungland^s Forgotten Worthies. 

disabled below, the captain, " finding the Spaniards as 
ready to entertain a composition as they could be to offer 
it," gained over the majority of the surviving company ; 
and the remainder then drawing back from the master 
gunner, they ail, without further consulting their dying 
commander, surrendered on honorable terms. If unequal 
to the English in action, the Spaniards were at least as 
courteous in victory. It is due to them to say, that the 
conditions were faithfully observed ; and " the ship being 
marvelous unsavourie," Alonzo de Bapon, the Spanish 
Admiral, sent his boat to bring Sir Richard on board his 
own vessel. 

Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied 
that " he might do with his body what he list, for that he 
esteemed it not ; " and as he was carried out of the ship 
he swooned, and reviving again, desired the company to 
pray for him. 

The Admiral used him with all humanity, " commending 
his valor and worthiness, being unto them a rare specta- 
cle, and a resolution seldom approved." The officers of 
the fleet, too, John Higgins tells us, crowded round to look 
at him ; and a new fight had almost broken out between 
the Biscayans and the " Portugals," each claiming the 
honor of having boarded the Revenge. 

In a few hours Sir Richard, feehng his end approaching, showed 
not any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and 
said, " Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet 
mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do 
that hath fought for his country, queen, religion, and honor. 
Whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body, and 
shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and 
true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do." 
When he had finished these or other such like words, he gave up 
the ghost with great and stout courage, and no man could per- 
ceive any sign of heaviness in him. 

uch was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591, 



Englayid's Forgotten Worthies. 405 

without its equal in such of the annals of mankind as the 
thing which we call history has preserved to us ; scarcely 
equaled by the most glorious fate which the imagination 
of Barrere could invent for the Venguer, Nor did the 
matter end without a sequel awful as itself Sea-battles 
have been often followed by storms, and without a miracle ; 
but with a miracle, as the Spaniards and the English alike 
believed, or without one, as we moderns would prefer be- 
lieving, '• there ensued on this action a tempest so terrible 
as was never seen or heard the like before." A fleet of 
merchantmen joined the armada immediately after the bat- 
tle, forming in all 140 sail ; and of these 140, only 32 ever 
saw Spanish harbor. The rest foundered, or were lost on 
the Azores. The men-of-war had been so shattered by 
shot as to be unable to carry sail ; and the Revenge her- 
self, disdaining to survive her commander, or, as if to 
complete his own last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried 
herself and her 200 prize crew under the rocks of St. 
Michael's. 

And it may well be thought and presumed (says John Huighen) 
that it was no other than a just plague purposely sent upon the 
Spaniards ; and that it might be truly said, the taking of the 
Revenge was justly revenged on them ; and not by the might 
or force of man, but by the power of God. As some of them 
openly said in the Isle of Terceira, that they believed verily God 
would consume them, and that He took part with the Lutherans 
and heretics .... saying further, that so soon as they had thrown 
the dead body of the Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Grenville over- 
board, they verily thought that as he had a devilish faith and re- 
ligion, and therefore the devil loved him, so he presently sunk 
into the bottom of the sea and down into hell, where he raised up 
all the devils to the revenge of his death, and that they brought 
so great a storm and torments upon the Spaniards, because they 
only maintain the Catholic and Romish religion. Such and the 
like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to utter. 



HOMER. 



Troy fell before the Greeks ; and in its turn the war of 
Troy is now falling before the critics. That ten years' 
death-struggle, in which the immortals did not disdain to 
mingle — those massive warriors, with their grandeur and 
their chivalry, have, " like an unsubstantial pageant, faded " 
before the wand of these modern enchanters ; and the 
" Iliad " and the " Odyssey," and the other early legends, are 
discovered to be no more than the transparent myths of an 
old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescos with which the 
imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented 
the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with 
the seasons, and the labors of the sun through his twelve 
signs. 

Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to 
have fared no better. His works, indeed, were indestructi- 
ble, yet if they could not be destroyed, they might be dis- 
organized ; and with their instinctive hatred of facts, the 
critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet. 
The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds 
of pre-historic imagination ; and instead of a single in- 
spired Homer for their author, we were required to believe 
in some extraordinary spontaneous generation, or in some 
collective genius of an age which ignorance had personified. 

But the person of a poet has been found more difficult 
of elimination than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was 

i Fraser's Magazine, 1851. 



Homer. 407 

once said, were stubborn things ; but in our days we have 
changed all that ; a fact, under the knife of a critic, splits 
in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with incredible 
readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a 
foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an un- 
scrupulous advocate, and is turned about and twisted this 
way and that way, till in its distraction it contradicts itself, 
and bears witness against itself; and to escape from tor- 
ture, at last flies utterly away, itself half doubting its own 
existence. 

But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Ho- 
mer; like his own immortals, he may be wounded, but 
he cannot have the life carved out of him by the prosaic 
strokes of common men. His jDoems have but to be dis- 
integrated to unite again, so strong are they in the indi- 
viduality of their genius. The singleness of their struct- 
ure — the unity of design — the distinctness of drawing in 
the characters — the inimitable peculiarities of manner in 
each of them, seem to j^lace beyond serious question, after 
the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both " Iliad" 
and *' Odyssey," whether or not the work of the same mind, 
are at least each of them ^ngly the work of one. 

Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank 
and file of facts they may do their worst ; we can be indif- 
ferent to, or even thankful for, what slaughter they may 
make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of Zeus 
and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical 
allegory ; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dios- 
curi, a physical one ; in that of Athene, a profoundly phil- 
osophical one ; and fused as the entire system was in the 
intensely poetical conception of the early thinkers, it would 
be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this time of day 
to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements. 
Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the le- 
gendary and the philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly 
one into the other, in the stories of the Olympians, or of 



408 Homer. 

their first offspring, that we can never assure ourselves that 
we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to the really 
historic age, there is any such ground to be found any- 
where. The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, 
is no longer tenable. With but few exceptions, we can 
trace their names as the natnes of the old gods of the Hel- 
lenic or Pelasgian races ; and if they apjDeared later in 
hun)an forms, they descended from Olympus to assume 
them. Diomed was the CEtolian sun-god; Achilles was 
worshiped in Thessaly long before he became the hero of 
the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of Atreus, 
and the bloody bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told 
with appearance of certainty,-^ are humanized stories of 
the physical struggle of the opposing principles of life 
and death, light and darkness, night and day, winter and 
summer. 

And let them be so ; we need not be sorry to believe 
that there is no substantial basis for these tales of crime. 
The history of mankind is not so pure but that we can af- 
ford to lose a few dark pages out of the record. Let it be 
granted that of the times which Homer sung historically we 
know nothing literal at all — not any names of any kings, 
of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They 
are all gone — dead — passed away ; their vacant chronicles 
may be silent as the tombs in which their bones are buried. 
Of such stuff' as that with which historians fill their pages 
there is no trace ; it is a blank, vacant as the annals of the 
Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said, 
there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, 
perhaps, than exist for any period of the ancient world, 
richer than even for the brilliant days of Pericles, or of 
the Caesars, to construct a history of another kind — a his- 
tory, a picture not of the times of which he sang, but of 
the men among whom he lived. How they acted ; how 
they thought, talked, and felt; what they made of this 
1 Mackay's Progress of the Intellect. 



Homer. 409 

earth, and of their place in it ; their private life and their 
public life ; men and women ; masters and servants ; rich 
and poor — we have it all delineated in the marvelous 
verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect 
the greatest which the earth has ever seen. In extent, 
the information is little enough ; but in the same sense as 
it has been said that an hour at an Athenian supper-party 
would teach us more Grecian life and character than all 
Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so 
living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclo- 
pedia of disconnected facts could give us nothing like 
them. It is the marvelous property of verse — one, if we 
rightly consider it, which would excuse any superstition on 
the origin of language — that the metrical and rhythmic 
arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and ex- 
press back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions 
themselves, with all the feelings which inspire them ; to 
call up human action, and all other outward things in 
which human hearts take interest — to produce them, or to 
reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce 
the same emotions which they would themselves produce 
when really existing. The thing itself is made present be- 
fore us by an exercise of creative power as genuine as that 
of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the same power 
manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in out- 
ward phenomena. Whatever be the cause, the fact is so. 
Poetry has this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and 
thus the poet is the truest historian. Whatever is prop- 
erly valuable in history the poet gives us — not events and 
names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is the heart 
of his age, and his verse expresses his age ; and what 
matter is it by what name he describes his places or his 
persons ? What matter is it what his own name was, while 
we have himself, and while we have the originals, from 
which he drew ? The work and the life are all for which 
we need care, are all which can really interest us : the 



410 . Homer. 

names are nothing. Though Phoeacia was a dream-land, 
or a symbol of the Elysian fields, yet Homer drew his ma- 
terial, his island, his palaces, his harbor, his gardens of 
perennial beauty, from those fair cities which lay along the 
shores of his own Ionia ; and like his blind Demodocus, 
Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which 
now delight us so, in the halls of many a princely Al- 
cinous. 

The prose historian may give us facts and names ; he 
may catalogue the successions, and tell us long stories 
of battles, and of factions, and of political intrigues ; he 
may draw characters for us, of the sort which figure com- 
monly in such features of human affairs, men of the unhe- 
roic, unpoetic kind — the Cleons, the Sej anuses, the Tibe- 
riuses, a Philip the Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom 
the noble element died out into selfishness and vulgarity. 
But great men — and all men properly so called (whatever 
is genuine and natural in them) — lie beyond prose, and can 
only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason 
why such men as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, 
so perplex us in histories, because they and their actions 
are beyond the scope of the art through which we have 
looked at them. We compare the man as the historian 
represents him, with the track of his path through the 
world. The work is the work of a ^giant ; the man, 
stripped of the vulgar appendages with which the stunted 
imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is full 
of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater 
than one of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted some- 
thing to which it is not equal. It describes a figure which 
it calls Caesar ; but it is not Caesar, it is a monster. For 
the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the like, are 
worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life 
which they are able to represent is not worth representing. 
There is no person so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze 
with pleasure into a looking-glass ; and the prose age may 



Homer, 411 

value its own image in the novel. But the value of all 
such representations is ephemeral. It is with the poet's 
art as with the sculptor's — sandstone will not carve like 
marble, its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded 
outline. The actions of men, if they are true, noble, and 
genuine, are strong enough to bear the form and bear the 
polish of verse ; if loose or feeble, they crumble away into 
the softer undulations of prose. 

What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Ho- 
mer's verse, we intend to spend these pages in examining. 
It is, of course, properly to be sought for in the poems 
themselves. But we shall here be concerned mainly with 
features which in the original are rather secondary than 
prominent, and which have to be collected out of frag- 
ments, here a line and there a line, out of little hints, let 
fall by Homer as it were by accident. Things too familiar 
to his own hearers to require dwelling on, to us, whose ob- 
ject is to make out just those very things which were fa- 
miliar, are of special and singular value. It is not an 
inquiry which will much profit us, if we come to it with 
any grand notions of the " progress of the species," for in 
many ways it will discourage the belief in progress. 

We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood 
arid infancy of the race, as if no beards had grown on any 
face before the modern Reformation ; and even people who 
know what old Athens was under Pericles, look commonly 
on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of its cradle. 
It would have fared so with all early history except for 
the Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to 
keep us in our modest senses, and we can see something 
grand about the patriarchs ; but this is owing to excep- 
tional causes, which do not apply to other literature ; and 
in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard 
his age, and the contemporary periods in the other people 
of the earth, as a kind of childhood little better than bar- 
barism. We look upon it, at all events, as too far re- 



412 Homer. 

moved in every essential of spirit or of form from our own, 
to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. 
More or less, we have, every one of us, felt something of 
this kind. Homer's men are, at first sight, unlike any men 
that we have ever seen ; and it is not without a shock of 
surprise that, for the first time, we fall, in reading him, 
across some little trait of humanity which in form as well 
as spirit is really identical with our own experience. Then 
for the moment, all is changed with us — gleams of light 
flash out, in which the drapery becomes transparent, and 
we see the human form behind it, and that entire old world 
in the warm glow of flesh and blood. Such is the effect 
of those few child-scenes of his, which throw us back into 
our old familiar childhood. With all these years between 
us, there is no difference between their children and ours, 
and child would meet child without sense of strangeness in 
common games and common pleasures. 

The little Ulysses climbing on the knees of his father's 
guest, coaxing for a taste of the red wine, and spilling it as 
he starts at the unusual taste ; or that other most beautiful 
picture of him running at Laertes's side in the garden at 
Ithaca, the father teaching the boy the names of the fruit- 
trees, and making presents to him of this tree and of that 
tree for his very own, to help him to remember what they 
were called ; the partition wall of three thousand years 
melts away as we look back at scenes like these; that 
broad, world-experienced man was once, then, such a little 
creature as we remember ourselves, and Laertes a calm, 
kind father of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the 
children loved to sport upon the shore, and watch the in-roll- 
ing waves ; — then, as now, the boy-architect would pile 
the moist sand into mimic town or castle, and when the 
work was finished, sweep it away again in wanton humor 
with foot and hand ; — then, as now, the little tired maiden 
would cling to her mother's skirt, and trotting painfully 
along beside her, look up wistfully and plead with moist 



Homer. 413 

eyes to be carried in her arms. Nay, and among the 
grown ones, where time has not changed the occupation, 
and the forms of culture have little room to vary, we meet 
again with very familiar faces. There is Melantho, the 
not over-modest tittering waiting-maid — saucy to her mis- 
tress and the old housekeeper, and always running after 
the handsome young princes. Unhappy Melantho, true 
child of universal Nature 1 grievous work we should make 
with most households, if all who resemble thee were treated 
to as rough a destiny. And there are other old friends 
whom it is pleasant enough to recognize at so long a dis- 
tance. " Certain smooth-haired, sleek-faced fellows — in- 
solent where their lords would permit them ; inquisitive 
and pert, living but to eat and drink, and pilfering the 
good things, to convey them stealthily to their friends out- 
side the castle wall." The thing that hath been, that shall 
be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into 
its long enduring form. " S uch are thej," he adds, in his 
good-natured irony, "as the valet race ever love to be." 

With such evidence of identity among us all, it is worth 
while to look closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Ho- 
mer something beyond fine poetry, or exciting adventures, 
or battle-scenes, or material for scholarship ; for a while to 
set all that aside, and look in him for the story of real liv- 
ing men — set to pilgrimize in the old way on the same 
old earth — men such as we are, children of one family, 
with the same work to do, to live the best life they could 
and to save their souls — with the same trials, the same 
passions, the same difficulties, if with weaker means of 
meeting them. 

And first for their religion. 

Let those who like it, lend their labor to the unraveling 
the secrets of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theolo- 
gies are not religion ; they are but its historic dress and 
outward or formal expression, which, like a language, may be 
intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the sign, 



414 Homer, 

but no more than confused sound to us who live in another 
atmosj^here, and have no means of transferring ourselves 
into the sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these 
forms of a day or of an age that we should look for the 
real belief — the real feelings of the heart ; but in the 
natural expressions which burst out spontaneously — ex- 
pressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of man 
to God, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. 
Perhaps we misuse the word in speaking of religion ; we 
ought rather to speak of piety : piety is always simple ; the 
emotion is too vast, too overpowering, whenever it is gen- 
uine, to be nice or fantastic in its form ; and leaving phi- 
losophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in myth and 
legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clear- 
ness. We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand 
them over to the fancy or the imagination for elaborate 
decoration. We may shroud over supposed mysteries 
under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation 
to the capacities of our pupils ; but before the vast facts of 
God and Providence, the difference between man and man 
dwarfs into nothing. They are no discoveries of our own 
with which we can meddle, but revelations of the Infinite, 
which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike, wise 
and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit 
no other acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience 
of our lives, and the plainest confession of our lips. 

Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not 
anywhere find more natural or unaffected than in Homer 
— most definite, yet never elaborate — as far as may be 
from any complimenting of Providence, yet expressing the 
most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often re- 
member them when we set about religion as a business ; 
but when the occasions of life stir the feelings in us on 
which religion itself reposes, if we were as familiar with 
the " Iliad " as with the Psalms, the words of the old Ionian 
singer would leap as naturally to our lips as those of the 
Israelite kins. 



Homer. 415 

Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor 
the gods always the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it 
is true, they appear as a larger order of subject beings — 
beings like men, and subject to a higher control — in a 
position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and 
liable like them to passion and to error. But at times, the 
father of gods and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler 
— the living Providence of the world — and the lesser 
gods are the immortal administrators of his Divine will 
throughout the lower creation. Forever at the head of 
the universe there is an awful spiritual power ; when Zeus 
appears with a distinct and positive personality, he is him- 
self subordinate to an authority which elsewhere is one 
with himself. Wherever either he or the other gods are 
made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and 
above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpe- 
don, and his private love conflicts with the law of the eter- 
nal order, though he has power to set aside the law he 
dares not break it ; but in the midst of his immortality, 
and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in 
ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is 
a power supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of 
which Iris reminds the latter, when she is sent to rebuke 
him for his disobedience to his brother. It is a law, she 
says, that the younger shall obey the elder, and the Erin- 
nys will revenge its breach even on a god. 

But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among 
mankind, the Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly 
as we in this day can conceive it. The supreme power 
is the same immortal lover of justice and the same hater 
of iniquity ; and justice means what we mean by justice, and 
iniquity what we mean by iniquity. There is no diffidence, 
no skepticism on this matter ; the moral law is as sure as day 
and night, summer and winter. Thus in the sixteenth Iliad — 
" When in the market-place men deal unjustly, and the 
rulers decree crooked judgment, not regarding the fear of 



416 Homer. 

God," God sends the storm, and the earthquake, and the 
tempest, as the executors of his vengeance. 

Again, Ulysses says, — " God looks upon the children of 
men, and punishes the wrong-doer." 

And Eumseus, — '•' The gods love not violence arid 
wrong ; but the man whose ways are righteous, him they 
honor." 

Even when as mere Olympians they put off their celes- 
tial nature, and mix in earthly strife, and are thus laid 
open to earthly suffering, a mystery still hangs about them ; 
Diomed, even while he crosses the path of Ares, feels all 
the while ••' that they are short-lived who contend with the 
Immortals." Ajax boasts that he will save himself in spite 
of Heaven, and immediately the wave dashes him upon the 
rocks. One light word escaped Ulysses in the excitement 
of his escape from the Cyclops, which nine years of suifer- 
ing hardly expiated. 

The san^e spirit which teaches Christians that those who 
have no earthly friend have specially a friend above to 
care for and to avenge them, taught the lonians a proverb 
which appears again and again in Homeii, that the stranger 
and the poor man are the patrimony of God ; and it taught 
them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals 
unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words 
with them ; for we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, 
and it was sacrilege to turn . away from the gate whoever 
asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The world was 
not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less 
abundant ; but at any rate those antique Greeks did what 
they said. We say what they said, while in the same breath 
we say, too, that it is impossible to do it. 

In every way, the dependence of man on a special 
heavenly Providence was a matter of sure and certain con- 
viction with them. Telemachus appeals to the belief in the 
Council at Ithaca. He questions it at Pylos, and is at once 
rebuked by Athene. Both in " Iliad " and " Odyssey " to live 



Earner. 417 

justly is the steady service which the gods require, and 
their favor as surely follows when that service is paid, as a 
Nemesis sooner or later follows surely, too, on the evil-doers. 
But without multiplying evidence, as we easily might, 
from every part of both " Iliad " and " Odyssey " the skepti- 
cal and the believing forms of thought and feeling on this 
very subject are made points of dramatic contrast, to show 
off the opposition of two separate characters ; and this is 
clear proof that such thoughts and feelings must have 
been familiar to Homer's hearers : if it were not so, his 
characters would have been without interest to his age — 
they would have been individual, and not universal ; and 
no expenditure of intellect, or passion, would have made 
men care to listen to him. The two persons who through- 
out the "Iliad" standout in relief in contrast to each other, 
are, of course. Hector and Achilles ; and faith in God (as 
distinct from a mere recognition of Him) is as directly the 
characteristic of Hector as in Achilles it is entirely absent. 
Both characters are heroic, but the heroism in them springs 
ffom opposite sources. Both are heroic, because both 
are strong ; but the strength of one is in himself, and the 
strength of the other is in his faith. Hector is a patriot ; 
Achilles does not know what patriotism means ; — Hector 
is full of tenderness and human affection ; Achilles is self- 
enveloped. Even his love for Patroclus is not pure, for 
Patroclus is as the moon to the sun of Achilles, and 
Achilles sees his own glory reflected on his friend. They 
have both a forecast of their fate ; but Hector, in his 
greatbra^veway, scoffs at omens ; he knows that there is 
a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, and defies 
augury. To do his duty is the only omen for which Hector 
cares ; and if death must be, he can welcome it like a gal- 
lant man, if it find him fighting for his country. Achilles 
is moody, speculative, and subjective ; he is too proud to 
attempt an ineffectual resistance to what he knows to be 
inevitable, but he alternately murmurs at it and scorns it. 
27 



418 . Homer. 

Till his passion is stirred by his friend's death, he seems 
equally to disdain the greatness of life and the littleness 
of it ; the glories of a hero are not worth dying for ; and 
like Solomon, and almost in Solomon's words, he complains 
that there is one event to all : — 

"Ef 6e Itj Tt/.iy ^ fiEV KUKog 7/e koL ea^&Xog. 

To gratify his own spleen, he will accept an inglorious age 
in Thessaly, in exchange for a hero's immortality ; as again 
in the end it is but to gratify his own wounded pride that 
he goes out to brave a fate which he scorns while he knows 
that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the hero of the 
stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or 
question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, 
iron law, meets force with force, and holds up against it 
an unbroken, unbending will. Human nature is at its best 
but a miserable business to him ; death and sorrow are its 
inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such 
things, but he will not pretend to regard them as any thing 
but detestable ; and he comforts the old, weeping king of 
Troy, whose age he was himself bringing down to the 
grave in sorrow, with philosophic meditations on the vanity 
of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing the elements of 
life out of the two urns of good and evil. 

Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. 
Achilles is all self. Hector all self-forgetfulness ; Achilles 
all pride. Hector all modesty. The confidence of Achilles 
is in himself and in his own arm ; Hector knows (and 
the strongest expressions of the kind in all the " Iliad " are 
placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no 
strength except from above. " God's will," he says, " is 
over all; He makes the strong man to fear, and gives 
the victory to the weak, if it shall please Him." And at 
last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, 
not with a defiance, but calmly saying, " I know that thou 
art mighty, and that my strength is far less than thine ; but 



Homer. 419 

these things lie in the will- of the gods ; and I, though 
weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from thee, if 
the immortals choose to have it so." 

So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, 
the feeling of Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, 
is distinct. Both the great poems bearing his name speak 
in the same language. But beyond the general fact, many 
questions rise in the application of the creed, and on one of 
these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem 
to mark the " Odyssey " as of a later age) there is a very sin- 
gular discrepancy.- In the " Iliad," the life of man on this 
side the grave is enough for the completion of his destiny 
— for his reward, if he lives nobly ; for his punishment, if 
he be base or wicked. Without repinings or skepticisms 
at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is con- 
tented with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of 
life as they are ; it never seems to occur to him as seriously 
possible that a bad man could succeed or a good one fail ; 
and as the ways of Providence, therefore, require no vindi- 
cating, neither his imagination nor his curiosity tempts him 
into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is the 
long home to which men go when dismissed out of their 
bodies ; but it is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see 
nothing, and concerning which no conjectures are ventured. 
Achilles, in his passion over Patroclus, cries out, that al- 
though the dead forget the dead in the halls of the de- 
parted, yet that he will remember his friend ; and through 
the " Iliad " there is nothing clearer than these vague words 
to show with what hopes or fears the poet looked for- 
ward to death. So far, therefore, his faith may seem im- 
perfect ; yet, perhaps, not the less noble because imperfect ; 
religious men in general are too well contented with the 
promise of a future life, as of a scene where the seeming 
short-comings of the Divine administration will be carried 
out with larger equity. But whether imperfect or not, or 
whatever be the account of the omission, the theory of 



420 Homer. 

Hades in the " Odyssey " is developed into far greater dis- 
tinctness ; the future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no 
longer uncertain ; there is the dreadful prison-house, with 
the judge upon his throne — and the darker criminals are 
overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in life. 
The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to 
and fro, mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feed- 
ing on its memory. And more than this, as if it were 
beginning to be felt that something more was wanted 
after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the Divine 
rule, we have a glimpse — it is but one, but it is like a ray 
of sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave — " of 
the far-off Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with 
the golden hair, where life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, 
nor winter, nor any rain or storm, and the never-dying 
zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the ocean." 

However vague the filling up of such a picture, the out- 
line is correct to the best which has been revealed even in 
Christianity, and it speaks nobly for the people among 
whom, even in germ, such ideas could root themselves. 
But think what we will of their notions of the future, the 
old Greek faith, considered as a practical and nqt a theo- 
logical system, is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral ; 
if it does not profess to deal with the mysteries of evil in 
the heart, it is prompt and stern with them in their darker 
outward manifestations, and, as far as it goes, as a guide in 
the common daily business of life, it scarcely leaves any 
thing unsaid. 

How far it went we shall see in the details of the life it- 
self, the most important of which in the eyes of a modern 
will be the social organization ; and when he looks for or- 
ganization, he will be at once at a loss, for he will find the 
fact of government yet without defined form — he will find 
law, but without a public sword to enforce it ; and a " so- 
cial machine " moving without friction under the easy con- 
trol of opinion. There are no wars of classes, no politics. 



Homer. 421 

no opposition of interests, — a sacred feeling of the will of 
the gods keeping every one in his proper subordination. 
It was a sacred duty that the younger should obey the el- 
der, that the servant should obey his master, that property 
should be respected; in war, that the leader should be 
obeyed without questioning; in peace, that public ques- 
tions should be brought before the assembly of the people, 
and settled quietly as the Council determined. In this as- 
sembly the prince presided, and beyond this presidency his 
authority at home does not seem to have extended. Of 
course there was no millennium in Ionia, and men's pas- 
sions were pretty much what they are now. Without any 
organized means of repressing crime when it did appear, 
the people were exposed to, and often suffered under, ex- 
treme forms of violence — violence such as that of the 
suitors at Ithaca, or of ^gistlius at Argos. On the other 
hand, what a state of cultivation it implies, what peace and 
comfort in all classes, when society could hold together for 
a day with no more complete defense. And, moreover, 
there are disadvantages in elaborate police systems. / Self- 
reliance is one of the highest virtues in which this world is 
intended to discipline us ; and to depend upon ourselves 
even for our own personal safety, is a large element in 
moral training. 

But not to dwell on this, and to pass to the way in which 
the men of those days employed themselves. 

Our first boy's feeling with the " Iliad " is, that Homer 
is preeminently a poet of waj- ; that battles were his own 
passion, and tales of battles the delight of his listeners. 
His heroes appear like a great fighting aristocracy, such 
as the after Spartans were ; Homer himself like another 
Tyrtasus, and the poorer occupations of life too menial for 
their notice or for his. They seem to live for glory — the 
one glory worth caring for only to be won upon the battle- 
field, and their exploits the one worthy theme of the poet's 
song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other such, 



422 Eomer. 

it is very different from the truth. If war had been a pas- 
sion with the lonians, as it was with the Teutons and the 
Norsemen, the god of battles would have been supreme in 
the Pantheon ; and Zeus would scarcely have called Ares 
the most hateful spirit in Olympus — most hateful, because 
of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks for- 
ward to a chivalry of labor. He rather wishes than expects 
that a time may come when the campaign of industry against 
anarchic Nature may gather into it those feelings of gal- 
lantry and nobleness wiiich have found their vent hitherto 
in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr. Carlyle 
says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls ; 
but to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find 
a high employment for himself in what hitherto has been 
despised as degrading. How to elevate labor — how to 
make it beautiful — how to enlist the spirit in it (for in no 
other way can it be made humanly profitable), that is the 
problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for 
us. He may look to the past as well as to the future ; in the 
old Ionia he will find all for which he wishes. The wise 
Ulysses built his own house and carved his own bed. 
Princes killed and cooked their own food. It was a holy 
work with them — their way of saying grace for it ; for 
they oifered the animal in his death to the gods, and they 
were not butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper 
of swine is called noble, and fights like a hero ; and the 
young princess of Phoeacia — the loveliest and graceful- 
est of Homer's women — drove the clothes-cart and 
washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was 
labor free, — for so it was among the early Romans ; or 
honorable, so it was among the Israelites, — but it was 
beautiful — beautiful in the artist's sense, as perhaps else- 
where it has never been. In later Greece — in what we 
call the glorious period — toil had gathered about it its 
modern crust of supposed baseness — it was left to slaves ; 
and wise men, in their philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of 



Homer. 423 

it as unworthy of the higher specimens of cultivated hu- 
manity. 

But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit illustra- 
tions for the most glorious achievements of his heroes ; and 
in every page we find, in simile or metaphor, some com- 
mon scene of daily life worked out with elaborate beauty. 
What the popular poet chooses for his illustrations are as 
good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and 
the images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows 
his hearers will be pleased to dwell upon. There is much 
to be said about this, and we shall return to it presently ; 
in the mean time, we must not build on indirect evidence. 
The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together, a com- 
plete picture of Homer's microcosm ; Homer surely never 
thought inglorious or ignoble what the immortal art of 
Hephaistos condescended to imitate. 

The first groups of figures point a contrast v/hich is ob- 
viously intentional ; and the significance becomes sadly 
earnest when we remember who it was that was to bear 
the shield. The moral is a very modern one, and the pict- 
ure might be called by the modern name of Peace and 
War. There are two cities, embodying in their condition 
the two ideas. In one, a happy wedding is going forward ; 
the pomp of the hymeneal procession is passing along the 
streets ; the air is full of music, and the women are stand- 
ing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the terrors of 
a siege ; the hostile armies glitter under the walls ; the 
women and children press into the defense, and crowd to the 
battlements. In the first city, a quarrel rises ; and wrong 
is made right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the 
majesty of law and order. The heads of the families are 
sitting gravely in the market-place, the cause is heard, the 
compensation set, the claim awarded. Under the walls of 
the other city an ambush lies, like a wild beast on the 
watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pass on 
with their flocks to the waterside ; the spoilers spring from 



424 Homer, 

their hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, 
and confusion. If there were other war-scenes on the 
shield, it might be doubted whether Homer intended so 
strong a contrast as he executed ; but fighting for its own 
sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The 
forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a 
series of exquisite Rubens-like pictures, — harvest scenes 
and village festivals ; the ploughing and the vintage, or the 
lion-hunt on the reedy margin of the river ; and he de- 
scribes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no 
other old-world art or poetry gives us any thing in the 
least resembling. Even we ourselves, in our own pastor- 
als, are struggling with but half success, after what Homer 
entirely possessed. What a majesty he has thrown into 
his harvest scene ! The yellow corn falling, the boys fol- 
lowing to gather up the large armfuls as they drop behind 
the reapers ; in the distance, a banquet preparing under 
the trees ; in the centre, in the midst of his workmen, the 
king sitting in mellow silence, sceptre in hand, looking on 
with gladdened heart. Again we see the ploughmen, un- 
like what are to be seen in our corn-grounds, turning their 
teams at the end of the furrow, and attendants standing 
ready with the wine-cup, to hand to them as they pass. 
H^mer had seen these things, or he would not have sung 
of them ; and princes and nobles might have shared such 
labor without shame, when kings took part in it, and gods 
designed it, and the divine Achilles bore its image among 
his insignia in the field. 

Analogous to this, and as part of the same feeling, is 
that intense enjoyment of natural scenery, so keen in Ho- 
mer, and of which the Athenian poets show not a trace ; 
as, for instance, in that night landscape by the sea, finished 
off in a few lines only, but so exquisitely perfect ! The 
broad moon, gleaming through the mist as it parts sud- 
denly from off the sky ; the crags and headlands, and soft 
wooded slopes, shining out in the silver light, and earth 
and sea transformed into fairy land. 



Homer, 425 

We spoke of Homer's similes as illustrative of the Tonic 
feelings about war. War, of course, was glorious to him — 
but war in a glorious cause. Wars there were — wars in 
plenty, as there have been since, and as it is like there will 
be for some time to come ; and a just war, of all human 
employments, is the one which most calls out whatever 
nobleness there is in man. It was the thing itself, the 
actual fighting and killing, as apart from the heroism for 
which it makes opportunities, for which we said that he 
showed no taste. His manner shows that he felt like a 
cultivated man, and not like a savage. His spirit stirs in 
him as he goes out with his hero to the battle ; but there is 
no drunken delight in blood ; we never hear of warriors, as in 
that grim Hall of the " Nibelungen," quenching their thirst 
in the red stream ; never any thing of that fierce exultation 
in carnage with which the war poetry of so many nations, 
late and old, is crimsoned. Every thing, on the contrary, is 
contrived so as to soften the merely horrible, and fix our 
interest only on what is grand or beautiful. We are never 
left to dwell long together on scenes of death, and when 
the battle is at its fiercest, our minds are called off by the 
rapid introduction (either by simile or some softer turn of 
human feeling) of other associations, not contrived, as an 
inferior artist would contrive, to deepen our emotions, but 
to soften and relieve them. Two warriors meet, and ex- 
change their high words of defiance ; we hear the grinding 
of the spear-head, as it pierces shield and breast-plate, and 
the crash of the armor, as this or that hero falls. But at 
once, instead of being left at his side to see him bleed, we 
are summoned away to the soft water meadow, the lazy 
river, the tall poplar, now waving its branches against the 
sky, now lying its length along in the grass beside the 
water, and the woodcutter with peaceful industry laboring 
and lopping at it. 

In the thick of the universal melee, when the stones and 
arrows are raining on the combatants, and some furious 



426 Homer. 

hailstorm is the slightest illustration with which we should 
expect him to heighten the effect of the human tempest, so 
sure Homer is that he has painted the thing itself in its 
own intense reality, that his simile is the stillest phenome- 
non in all Nature — a stillness of activity, infinitely ex- 
pressive of the density of the shower of missiles, yet falling 
like oil on water on the ruffled picture of the battle ; the 
snow descending in the still air, covering first hills, therj 
plains and fields and farmsteads ; covering the rocks down 
to the very water's edge, and clogging the waves as they 
roll in. Again, in that fearful death-wrestle at the Grecian 
wall, when gates and battlements are sprinkled over with 
blood, and neither Greeks nor Trojans can force their way 
against the other, we have, first, as an image of the fight 
itself, two men in the field, with measuring rods, disputing 
over a land boundary ; and for the equipoise of the two 
armies, the softest of all home scenes, a poor working 
woman weighing out her wool before weaving it, to earn a 
scanty subsistence for herself and for her children. Of 
course the similes are not all of this kind ; it would be 
monotonous if they were ; but they occur often enough to 
mark their meaning. In the direct narrative, too, we see 
the same tendency. Sarpedon struck through the thigh is 
borne off the field, the long spear trailing from the wound, 
and there is too much haste to draw it out. Hector flies 
past him and has no time to speak ; all is dust, hurry, and 
confusion. Even Homer can only pause for a moment ; 
but in three lines he lays the wounded hero under a tree, 
he brings a dear friend to his side, and we refresh ourselves 
in a beautiful scene, when the lance is taken out, and 
Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the 
cool air fanning him. We may look in vain through the 
" Nibelungen Lied " for any thing like this. The Swabian 
poet can be tender before the battle, but in the battle itself 
his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and he scents 
nothing, but blood. In the " Iliad," on the contrary, the very 



Homer, 427 

battles of the gods, grand and awful as they are, relieve 
rather than increase the human horror. In the magnifi- 
cent scene, where Achilles, weary with slaughter, pauses 
on the bank of the Scamander, and the angry river-god, 
whose course is checked by the bodies of the slain, swells 
up to revenge them and destroy him, the natural and the 
supernatural are so strangely blended, that when Poseidon 
lights the forest, and god meets god and element meets 
element, the convulsion is too tremendous to enhance the 
fierceness of Achilles ; it concentrates the interest on itself, 
and Achilles and Hector, flying Trojan and pursuing Greek, 
for the time melt out and are forgotten. 

We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no 
rehef, no softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of 
the " Odyssey." AH is stern enough and terrible enough 
there; more terrible, if possible, because more distinct, 
than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall. But 
there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make 
against what we have been saying. It is not delight in 
sfaughter, but it is the stern justice of revenge which we 
have here ; not, as in the " Iliad," hero meeting hero, but 
the long crime receiving at last its Divine punishment ; the 
breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has 
been slowly and awfully gathering. 

With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illus- 
trating the conclusion which we argue from it, we are 
tempted to draw parallels from two modern poets — one a 
German, who was taken away in the morning of his life ; 
the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each 
of these two has attempted the same subject, and the treat- 
ment in each case embodies, in a similar manner, modern 
ways of thinking about it. 

The first is from the " Albigenses " of young Lenau, who 
has since died lunatic, we have heard, as he was not un- 
likely to have died with such thoughts in him. It is the 
eve of one of those terrible struggles at Toulouse, and the 



428 Eomer. 

poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the scene. 
" The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all 
silent, dead, — the last sob spent," — the priest's thanks- 
giving for the Catholic victory having died into an echo, 
and only the " vultures crying their Te Deum laudamus." 

" Hat Gott der Herr den Korperstoff erschafFen, 
Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein boser Geist, 
Dariiber stritten sie mit alien WafFen 
Und werden von den Vogeln nun gespeist, 
Die. ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen, 
Die Korper da sich lassen wohl behagen." 

" Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of 
their bodies ? or did some evil spirit bring it forth ? It 
was for this with all their might they fought, and now 
they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit gorg- 
ing merrily over their carrion, without asking from whence 
it earner 

In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death 
— death has no terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, 
calmly and proudly, and then it is over ; whatever offensive 
may follow after it, is concealed, or at least passed lightly 
over. Here, on the contrary, every thing most offensive is 
dwelt upon with an agonizing intensity, and the triumph 
of death is made to extend, not over the bodj* only, but 
over the soul, whose heroism it turns to mockery. The 
cause in which a man dies, is what can make his death 
beautiful ; but here Nature herself, in her stern, awful way, 
is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a wild 
and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted — doubly 
revolted, one would think, and yet we are not so ; instead 
of being revolted, we are affected with a sense of vast, sad 
magnificence. Why is this ? Because we lose sight of the 
scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy of the 
spirit. It is the true modern tragedy ; the note which 
sounds through Shakespeare's " Sonnets," through " Ham- 
let," through " Faust ; " all the deeper trials of the modern 



Homer. 429 

heart might be gathered out of those few lines : the sense 
of wasted nobleness — nobleness spending its energies upon 
what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream 
— at any rate, misgivings, skeptic and distracting ; yet the 
heart the while, in spite of the uncertainty of the issue, 
remaining true at least to itself. If the spirit of the Al- 
bigensian warriors had really broken down, or if the poet 
had pointed his lesson so as to say. Truth is a lie ; faith is 
folly ; eat, drink, and die, — then his picture would have 
been revolting ; but the noble spirit remains, though it is 
borne down and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is 
not revolting, but tragic. 

Far different from this — as far inferior in tone to 
Lenau's lines, as it exceeds them in beauty of workman- 
ship — is the well-known picture of the scene under the 
wall in the " Siege of Corinth " : — 

" He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall 
Hold o'er the dead their carnival ; 
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb; 
They wei-e too busy to bark at him ! 
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh, 
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh ; 
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull, 
As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull, 
As tbey lazily mumbled the bones of the dead, 
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed; 
So well had they broken a lingering fast 
With those who had fallen for that night's repast. 
And Alp knew, by the turbans that rolled on the sand. 
The foremost of these were the best of his band: 

The scalps were in the wild dog's maw, 
The hair was tangled round his jaw. 
Close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf, . 
There sate a vulture flapping a wolf. 
Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away. 
Scared by the dogs, from the human prey; 
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay, 
Picked by the birds, on the sands of the bay." 

For a parallel to the horribleness of this wonderfully 



430 Romer. 

painted scene we need not go to the " Nibelungen," for we 
shall find nothing like it there : we must go back to the 
carved slabs which adorned the banquet-halls of the As- 
syrian kings, where the foul birds hover over the stricken 
fields, and trail from their talons the entrails of the slain. 

And for what purpose does Byron introduce these 
frightful images? Was it in contrast to the exquisite 
moonlight scene which tempts the renegade out of his 
tent ? Was it to brinor his mind into a fit condition to 

o 

be worked upon by the vision of Francesca ? It does but 
mar and untune the softening influences of Nature, which 
might have been rendered more powerful, perhaps, by 
some slight touch to remind him of his past day's work, 
but are blotted out and paralyzed by such a mass of hor- 
rors. 

To go back to Homer. 

We must omit fOr the present any notice of the domestic 
pictures, of which there are so many, in the palaces of 
Ulysses, of Nestor, or of Alcinous ; of the games, so manly, 
yet, in point of refinement, so superior even to those of 
our own Middle Ages ; of the suj)reme good of life as the 
Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they en- 
deavored to realize that good. It is useless to notice such 
things briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. 
But the impression which we gather from them is the same 
which we have gathered all along — that if the proper 
aim of all human culture be to combine, in the highest 
measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of 
refinement and of manliness, then Homer's age was culti- 
vated to a degree the like of which the earth has not wit- 
nessed since. There was more refinement under Pericles, 
as there is more in modern London and Paris ; but there 
was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more 
fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times 
of feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere 
human sense, apart from any other aspect of the world 



Homer, 431 

which is involved in Christianity, it is difficult to point to 
a time when life in general was happier, and the character 
of man set in a more noble form. If we have drawn 
the picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. 
The shadow was there, doubtless, though we see it only 
in a few dark spots. The "Margites" would have supplied 
the rest, but the " Margites," unhappily for us, is lost. 
Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer 
to the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The 
grand is always more or less ideal, and the elevation of 
a moment is sublimed into the spirit of a life. Comedy, 
therefore, is essential for the representing of men ; and 
there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Aga- 
memnon's greatness was discolored, like Prince Henry's, 
by remembering, when he was weary, that poor creature — 
small beer — i. e. if the Greeks had got any. 

A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged 
to say that we find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint 
which even he is obliged to cast over the position of 
women. In the " Iliad," where there is no sign of male 
slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and 
though there does not seem to have been any practice 
of polygamy, the female prisoners fell, as a matter of course, 
into a more degraded position. It is painful, too, to ob- 
serve that their own feelings followed the practice of the 
times, and that they composed themselves to bear with- 
out reluctance whatever their destiny fbrced upon them. 
When Priam ventured into the Grecian camp for Hector's 
body, and stood under the roof of Achilles, he endured 
to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever yet en- 
dured — to give his hand to his son's destroyer. Briseis, 
whose bed was made desolate by the hand of the same 
Achilles, finds it her one greatest consolation, that the con- 
queror stoops to choose her to share his own. And when 
Hector in his last sad parting scene anticipates a like fate 
for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony 



432 Eomer. 

of horror with which such a possible future would be re- 
garded by a modern husband ; nor does Andromache, how- 
ever bitterly she feels the danger, protest, as a modern wife 
would do, that there was no fear for her — that death by 
sorrow's hand, or by her own, would preserve her to rejoin 
him. 

Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, 
conclusively fatal against a wife ; for we meet Helen, after 
a twenty years' elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mis- 
tress in the Spartan palace, entertaining her husband's 
guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not afraid even 
in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past — in strong 
terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like de- 
spairing prostration. Making the worst of this, however, 
yet even in this respect the Homeric Greeks were better 
than their contemporaries in Palestine ; and on the whole 
there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity when 
women held a higher place, or the relation between wife 
and husband was of a more free and honorable kind. 

For we have given but one side of the picture. When 
a woman can be the theme of a poet, her nature cannot be 
held in slight esteem ; and there is no doubt that Penelope 
is Homer's heroine in the " Odyssey." One design, at least, 
which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character 
of the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnes- 
tra had inflicted on it. Clytemnestra has every advan- 
tage ; Penelope every difficulty : the trial of the former 
lasted only half as long as that of the latter. Agamemnon 
in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a 
divine aotSos, a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand 
between her and temptation, and whom she had to mur- 
der before her passion could have its way. Penelope 
had to bear up alone for twenty weary years, without a 
friend, without a counselor, and with even a child whose 
constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed 
this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again 



Homer, 433 

and again. The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes 
a fate like his own to Ulysses. It is Ulysses's first thought 
when he wakes from his sleep to find himself in his own 
land ; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems only 
introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet 
the shades of the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own 
tale of the sad issue of their wooing, how far otherwise it 
had fared with Ulysses than with himself. Women, there- 
fore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic virtue 
as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which 
we have scarcely added. 

For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio 
system. The sexes lived together in easy unaffected in- 
tercourse. The ladies appeared in society naturally and 
gracefully, and their chief occupations were household 
matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic ar- 
rangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dress- 
ing-room, settled the bath, and arranged the convenience 
of his toilet-table. In their leisure hours, they were to be 
found, as now, in the hall or the saloon, and their work- 
table contained pretty much the same materials. Helen 
was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and 
Andromache worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A 
literalist like Mr. Mackay, who finds out that the Israelites 
were cannibals, from such expressions as "drinking the 
blood of the slain," might discover, perhaps, a similar un- 
pleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she 
might eat of the heart of Achilles ; but in the absence of 
other evidence, it is unwise in either case to press a meta- 
phor ; and the food of ladies, wherever Homer lets us see 
it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such fruits as were 
in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must 
have been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the 
uncouth figure of Ulysses emerged from under the wood, 
all sea-slime and nakedness, and only covered with a girdle 
of leaves — standing still to meet him when, the other girls 

28 



434 Homer. 

ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect conception 
of true female modesty ; and in the whole scene between 
them, Homer shows the most finished understanding of the 
delicate and tremulous relations which occur occasionally 
in the accidents of intercourse between highly cultivated 
men and women, and which he could only have learnt by 
living in a society where m.en and women met and felt in 
the way which he has described. 

Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did 
he live ? History has absolutely nothing to answer. His 
poems were not written ; for the art of writing (at any 
rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is 
a vague tradition that the " Iliad," and the " Odyssey," and a 
comic poem called the " Margites," were composed by an 
Ionian whose name was Homer, about four hundred years 
before Herodotus, or in the ninth century b. c. We know 
certainly that these poems were preserved by the RhajDso- 
dists, or popular reciters, who repeated them at private 
parties or festivals, until writing came into use, and they 
were fixed in a less precarious form. A later story was 
current, that we owe the collection to Pisistratus ; but an 
exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian con- 
ceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own 
land — Alcaeus, for instance — should have left such a 
work to be done by a foreigner. But this is really all 
which is known ; and the creation of the poems lies in 
impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us, 
therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is 
the same with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclu- 
sions ; yet the wildest is not without its use ; it has com- 
monly something to rest upon ; and internal evidence is only 
really valuable when outward testimony has been sifted to 
the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each 
poem is unquestionably the work of one man ; but whether 
both poems are the work of the same is yet suh judice. 
The Greeks believed they were ; and that is much. There 



Homer. 435 

are remarkable points of resemblance in style, yet not 
greater than the resemblances in the " Two Noble Kins- 
men " and in the " Yorkshire Tragedy " to " Macbeth " and 
" Hamlet ; " and there are more remarkable points of non- 
resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we read. On 
the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the 
" Odyssey " is sometimes unlike the " Iliad," so is one part of 
the " Iliad " sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive 
a genius equal to the creation of either " Iliad " or '' Odyssey " 
to have existed without leaving at least a legend of his 
name ; and the difficulty of criticizing style accurately in 
an old language will be appreciated by those who have 
tried their hand in their own language with the disputed 
plays of Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every 
w^ay ; and we shall best conclude our own subject by not- 
ing down briefly the most striking points of variation of 
which as yet no explanation has been attempted. AYe have 
already noticed several : the non-appearance of male slavery 
in the " Iliad " which is common in the " Odyssey " ; the 
notion of a future state ; and perhaps a fuller cultivation in 
the female character. Andromache is as delicate as Nau- 
sicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope ; and in marked 
contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the passage 
where the grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is 
compared to the grief of a young wife flinging herself on 
the yet warm body of her husband, and looking forward to 
her impending slavery with feelings of horror and repul- 
sion. But these are among the slightest points in which 
the two poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves 
in the " Odyssey," but there are ^^res, or serfs, an order with 
which we are familiar in later tim.es, but which again are 
not in the " Iliad." In the '• Odyssey " the Trojans are called 
i7n(3-qTop€<s tTTTrcui/, which must mean riders. In the " Iliad " 
horses are never ridden ; they are always in harness. 

Wherever in the " Odyssey " the Trojan war is alluded to 
(and it is very often), in no one case is the allusion to any 



436 Homer. 

thing which is mentioned in the " Iliad." We hear of the 
wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of Achilles, 
the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for liis arms. It 
might be said that the poet wished to supply afterwards 
indirectly what he had left in the " Iliad " untold ; but again, 
this is impossible, for a very curious reason. The " Iliad " 
ojDens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused such bit- 
ter woe to the Achaians. In the " Odyssey " it is still the 
wrath of Achilles; but singularly not with Agametmion, 
hut with JJlysses. Ulysses to the author of the " Odyssey " 
was a far grander person at Troy than he appears in the 
" Iliad." In the latter poem he is great, but far from one 
of the greatest ; in the other, he is evidently the next to 
Achilles ; and it seems almost certain that whoever wrote 
the " Odyssey " was working from some other legend of the 
war. There were a thousand versions of it. The tale of 
Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative po- 
sition of the heroes was doubtless chansjed accordinor to 
the sympathies or the patriotism of the singer. The char- 
acter of Ulysses is much stronger in the " Odyssey " ; and 
even when the same qualities are attributed to him — his 
soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence — they 
are held in very different estimation. The Homer of the 
" Iliad " has little liking for a talker. Thersites is his pattern 
specimen of such ; and it is the current scoff at unready 
warriors to praise their father's courage, and then to add — 

aXXa rhv vi'6u 
yelvaro efo x^PV^ P-^XVi ^l^PV ^^ ''"' o-jx^iva' 

But the Phoeacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the 
" Iliad " style, on the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is 
taught a different notion of human excellence. Ulysses 
tells him that he is a fool. " The gods," Ulysses says, " do 
not give all good things to all men, and often a man is 
made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favor they fling, 
like a garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people 



Homer, 437 

delight to look on him. He speaks with modest dignity, 
and he shines among the multitude. As he walks through 
the city, men gaze on him as on a god." 

Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. 
The very slightest external evidence would weigh them all 
down together. Perhaps the following may be of more 
importance : — 

In both poems there are " questionings of destiny," as 
the modern phrase goes. The thing which we call human 
life is looked in the face — this little checkered island of 
lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean of darkness ; 
and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds 
for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the 
last words of Ecclesiastes, " Fear God and keep his com- 
mandments : for this is the whole duty of man." But the 
world bears a different aspect, and the answer looks differ- 
ent in its application. In the " Iliad," in spite of the gloom 
of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense 
of life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no 
yearning for any thing beyond — nothing vague, notliing 
mystical. The earth, the men, the gods, have all a palpa- 
ble reality about them. From first to last we know where 
we are, and what we are about. In the " Odyssey " we are 
breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the 
moral mysteries of our being hang like a mist over us from 
the beginning to the end ; and the cloud from time to time 
descends on the actors, and envelopes them with a preter- 
natural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression 
of " suffering being the lot of mortals," as if it had been 
abused already for ungodly purposes. In the opening of 
the first book, Zeus reproves the folly of mortal men for 
casting the blame upon the gods, when they themselves, in 
spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in their 
own pen^erseness ; and we never know as we go on, so fast 
we pass from one to the other, when we are among mere 
human beings, and when among the spiritual or the mysti- 



438 Homer. 

cal. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals, those enchant- 
resses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor divine 
— at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in 
Olympus, or on the plains of Ilium ; and at times there is 
a strangeness even in the hero himself. Sometimes it is 
Ulysses painfully toiling his way home across the unknown 
ocean ; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that un- 
known ocean is the life across which we are wandering, 
with too many Circes, and Sirens, and '' Isles of Error " 
in our path. In the same spirit death is no longer the 
end ; and on every side long vistas seem to stretch away 
into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms. 

But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were 
still insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on 
which we are treading sometimes shakes under us, and we 
feel as Humboldt describes himself to have felt at the first 
shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of mysterious 
wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us 
like spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of 
their purpose. What are those Phceacian ships meant for 
which required neither sail nor oar, but of their own selves 
read the hearts of those they carried, and bore them 
wherever they would go ? — or the wild end of the ship 
which carried Ulysses home ? — or that terrible piece of 
second sight in the Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was 
brought from Pylos ? — or those islands, one of which is 
forever wasting while another is born into being to com- 
plete the number ? — or those mystical sheep and oxen, 
which knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring 
born to them, and whose flesh upon the spits began to 
crawl and bellow ? — or Helen singing round the horse in- 
side the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's heart 
fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own 
dear wife far away beyond the sea ? 

In the far gates of the Loestrygones, '' where such a nar- 
row rim of night divided day from day, that a man who 



Homer. 439 

needed not sleep might earn a double hire, and the cry of 
tlie shepherd at evening driving home his flock was heard 
by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture," we 
have, perhaps, some tale of a Phoenician mariner, who had 
wandered into the North Seas, and seen " the Norway sun 
set into sunrise." But what shall we say to that Syrian 
isle, " where disease is not, nor hunger, nor thirst, and 
where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with Artemis, 
and slays them with his silver bow ? " There is nothing in 
the " Iliad " like any of these stories. 

Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the 
poems. Each is so magnificent, that to have written both 
could scarcely have increased the greatness of the man 
who had written one ; and if there were two Homers, the 
earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had 
known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that 
the differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's 
own choice of the material which best suited two works so 
different, than that Nature was so largely prodigal as to 
have created in one age and in one people tw'o such men ; 
for whether one or two, the authors of the " Iliad " and the 
" Odyssey " stand alone with Shakespeare far away above 
mankind. 



THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS. 



1850. 



If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors 
had been completed, it would have contained the histories 
of 25,000 saints. So many the Catholic Church acknowl- 
edged and accepted as her ideals — as men who had not 
only done her honor by the eminence of their sanctity, but 
who had received while on earth an openly divine recogni- 
tion of it in gifts of supernatural power. And this vast 
number is but a selection ; the editors chose only out of 
the mass before them what was most noteworthy and trust- 
worthy, and what was of catholic rather than of national 
interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular 
mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian 
world, which is still held in external reverence among the 
Romanists, and of which the modern historians, provoked 
by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire absence 
of critical ability among its writers to distinguish between 
fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable 
word. Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest 
in them we shall say little in this place. The " Lives " 
have no form or beauty to give them attraction in them- 
selves ; and for their human interest the broad atmosphere 
of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had 
grown up under the shadow of the convent wall ; they were 
exotics, not from another climate, but from another age ; 
the breath of scorn fell on them, and having no root in the 
hearts and beliefs of men any more, but only in the senti- 



The Lives of the Saints. 441 

mentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank. 
And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the le- 
gends of the saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan 
mythologies ; to the full as remarkable, perhaps far more 
so, if the length and firmness of hold- they once possessed 
on the convictions of mankind is to pass for any thing in 
the estimate — and to ourselves they • have a near and 
peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the 
Catholic faith. 

Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule ; 
their extravagances, even the most grotesque of them, can 
be now seen to have their root in an idea, often a deep 
one, representing features of natural history or of meta- 
physical speculation, and we do not laugh at them any 
more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the 
first-fruits of knowledge ; the expression of a real reveren- 
tial belief Then time did its work on them ; knowledge 
grew, and they could not grow ; they became monstrous 
and mischievous, and were driven out by Christianity with 
scorn and indignation. But it is with human institutions 
as it is with men themselves ; we are tender with the dead 
when their power to hurt us has passed away ; and as Pa- 
ganism can never more be dangerous, we have been able 
to command a calmer attitude towards it, and to detect 
under its most repulsive features sufficient latent elements 
of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their darkest 
aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood 
and absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediaeval 
mythology what it has done for Hesiod and for the " Ed da," 
we shall find there also at least as deep a sense of the 
awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a moral 
element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the 
saints are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful ; 
yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty, they are always 
good. 

And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on 



442 The Lives of the Saints, 

the magnitude of the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists 
were restricted on many sides. They took only what was 
in Latin — while every country in Europe had its own 
home growth in its own language — and thus many of the 
most characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all 
in their collection. And again, they took but one life of 
each saint, composed in all cases late, and compiled out of 
the mass of various shorter lives which had grown up in 
different localities out of jDopular tradition ; so that many 
of their longer productions have an elaborate literary char- 
acter, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know 
how they came into existence, might blind us to the vast 
width and variety of the traditionary sources from which 
they are drawn. In the twelfth century there were sixty- 
six lives extant of St. Patrick alone ; and that in a country 
where every parish had its own special saint and special 
legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained 
(Mr. Gibbon says must have contained) at least as many 
thousand lies. Perhaps so. To severe criticism, even the 
existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick, appears problem- 
atical. But at least there is the historical fact, about which 
there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in 
some way or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened 
to, written, and read ; that these lives in Ireland, and all 
over Europe and over the earth, wherever the Catholic 
faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out of the 
heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the en- 
tire believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever 
church was founded, or soil was consecrated for the long 
resting-place of those who had died in the faith ; wher- 
ever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were heard 
in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and 
remembrance of God, tliere dwelt the memory of some 
apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the sepul- 
chre of some martyr whose relics reposed beneath the 
altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for his 



The Lives of the Saints. 443 

Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self chosen 
austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, 
on which the angels of God were believed to have ascended 
and descended. It is not a phenomenon of an age or of a 
century ; it is characteristic of the history of Christianity. 
From the time when the first preachers of the faith passed 
out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to 
and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at 
last disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred 
legends began to grow. Those who had once known the 
Apostles, who had drawn from their lips the blessed mes- 
sage of light and life, one and all would gather together 
what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumors 
blew in from all the winds. They had been seen here, 
had been seen there, in the farthest corners of the earth, 
preaching, contending, suffering, prevailing. Affection did 
not stay to scrutinize. When some member of a family 
among ourselves is absent in some far place from which 
sure news of him comes slowly and uncertainly ; if he has 
been in the army, or on some dangerous expedition, or at 
sea, or anywhere where real or imaginary dangers stimu- 
late anxiety ; or when one is gone away from us altogether 
— fallen perhaps in battle — and when the story of his end 
can be collected but fitfully from strangers, who only knew 
his name, but had heard him nobly spoken of; the faint- 
est threads are caught at ; reports, the vagueness of which 
might be evident to indifference, are to love strong grounds 
of confidence, and " trifles lioht as air " establish them- 
selves as certainties. So, in those first Christian commu- 
nities, travellers came through from east and west ; legions 
on the march, or caravans of wandering merchants ; and 
one had been in Rome, and seen Peter disputing with 
Simon Magus ; another in India, where he had h.eard St. 
Thomas preaching to the Brahmins ; a third brought with 
him, from the wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as 
he said, from a thorn-tree, the seed of which St. Joseph 



444 The Lives of the Saints. 

had sown there, and which had grown to its full size in a 
single night, making merchandise of the precious relic out 
of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and 
were treasured up, and loved, and trusted ; and, alas ! all 
which we have been able to do with them is to call them 
lies, and to point a shallow moral on the impostures and 
credulities of the early Catholics. An atheist could not 
wish us to say more. If we can really believe that the 
Christian Church was made over in its very cradle to lies 
and to the father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his 
keeping, so to say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble 
himself with any faith which after such an admission we 
may profess to entertain. For, as this spirit began in the 
first age in which the Church began to have a history, so 
it continued so long as the Church as an integral body re- 
tained its vitality, and only died out in the degeneracy 
which preceded and which brought on the Reformation. 
For fourteen hundred years these stories held their place, 
and rang on from age to age, from century to century ; as 
the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever 
more and more great names of men and women who had 
fought and died for it, so* long their histories, living in the 
hearts of those for whom they labored, laid hold of them 
and filled them ; and the devout imagination, possessed 
with what was often no more than the rumor of a name, 
bodied it out into life, and form, and reality. And doubt- 
less, if we try them by any historical canon, we have to say 
that quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed 
among men ; and not believed only, but held sacred, pas- 
sionately and devotedly ; not filling the history books only, 
not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to 
furnish matter for meditation in the cell, but claiming days 
for themselves of special remembrance, entering into litur- 
gies and inspiring prayers, forming the spiritual nucleus of 
the hopes and fears of millions of human souls. 

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idol- 



The Lives of the Saints. 445 

ater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain-peak 
on the wild west Irish shore, where, for more than ten cen- 
turies, a rude old bell and a carved chip of oak have wit- 
nessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long ago 
there of the Irish apostle ; and where, in the sharp crys- 
tals of the trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the 
bare feet and bleeding knees of the pilgrims, who still, in 
the August weather, drag their painful way along it as they 
have done for a thousand years. Doubtless the " Lives of 
the Saints " are full of lies. Are there none in the " Iliad ? " 
or in the* legends of JEneas ? Were the stories sung in 
the liturgy of Eleusis all so true ? so true as fact ? Are 
the songs of the Cid or of Siegfried true ? We say noth- 
ing of the lies in these ; but why ? Oh, it will be said, 
but they are fictions ; they were never supposed to be true. 
But they ivere supposed to be true, to the full as true as 
the " Legenda Aurea." Oh, then, they are poetry ; and 
besides, they have nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, 
that is it ; they have nothing to do with Christianity. Re- 
ligion has grown such a solemn business with us, and we 
bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or con- 
ceive to be at all naturally admissible such a light compan- 
ion as the imagination. The distinction between secular 
and religious has been extended even to the faculties ; and 
we cannot tolerate in others the fullness and freedom 
which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it has 
been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found them- 
selves off the recognized ground of Romance and Pagan- 
ism, and they failed to see the same principles at work, 
though at work with new materials. In the records of all 
human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that two 
kinds of truth run forever side by side, or rather, crossing 
in and out with each other, form the warp and the woof of 
the colored web which we call history : the one, the literal 
and external truths corresponding to the eternal and as yet 
undiscovered laws of fact ; the other, the truths of feeling 



446 The Lives of the Saints. 

and of thought, which embody themselves either in dis- 
torted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new 
creation — sometimes moulding and shaping real history ; 
sometimes taking the form of heroic biography, of tradi- 
tion, or popular legend ; sometimes appearing as recog- 
nized fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It is 
useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. 
We are stating a fact, not a theory ; and if it makes truth 
and falsehood difficult to distinguish, that is Nature's fault, 
not ours. Fiction is only false, when it is false, not to fact, 
else how could it be fiction ? but when it is — to Imv. To 
try it by its correspondence to the real is pedantry. Imag- 
ination creates as Nature creates, by the force which is in 
man, which refuses to be restrained ; we cannot help it, and 
we are only false when we make monsters, or when we pre- 
tend that our inventions are facts, when we substitute truths 
of one kind for truths of another ; when we substitute, — 
and again we must say when we intentionally substitute : — 
whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on 
the imagination (and of course when there is any thing 
remarkable in them they must and will do so), invention 
glides into the images which form in our minds ; so it must 
be, and so it ever has been, from the first legends of a cos- 
mogony to the written life of the great man who died last 
year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We 
cannot relate facts as they are ; they must first pass 
through ourselves, and we are more or less than mortal if 
they gather nothing in the transit. The great outlines 
alone lie around us as imperative and constraining ; the 
detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our 
sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general the- 
ories of things : and therefore it may be said that the only 
literally true history possible is the history which mind has 
left of itself in all the changes through which it has passed. 
Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious 
as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious and careful, 



The Lives of the Saints. 447 

and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny. Suetonius gives 
us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but that is all the 
difference ; each follows the form of the supernatural 
which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes 
a life of Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of 
the trials and vicissitudes of his age ; and the existence of 
Lycurgus is now quite as questionable as that of St. Pa- 
trick or of St. Georore of England. 

No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. 
Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, 
and indifference is impossible. Love is blind, and so is 
every other passion. Love believes eagerly what it de- 
sires ; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it dwells 
on what is beautiful ; while dislike sees a tarnish on what 
is brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe 
that all this is a disease of unenlightened times, and that 
in our strong sunlight only truth can get received ? — then 
let us contrast the portrait, for instance, of Sir Eobert 
Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester,^ 
at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. 
It is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only 
to an impassive spirit. Man will never write it, until per- 
fect knowledge and perfect faith in God shall enable him 
to see and endure every fact in its reality ; until perfect 
love shall kindle in him under its touch the one just emo- 
tion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all 
things. 

How far we are in these days from approximating to 
such a combination we need not here insist. Criticism in 
the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have accomplished 
great intellectual triumphs ; and in Germany and France, 
and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the phi- 
losophy of history : yet their real successes have hitherto 
only been destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it 
does nothing but project its own idea ; when it throws off 
1 Written in 1850. 



448 The Lives of the Saints. 

tradition, it cannot work without a theory : and what is a 
theory but an imperfect generalization caught up by a pre- 
disposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras 
but a theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which 
he can mould to illustrate it, as every clever man will find 
facts to be, let his theory be what it will ? Intellect can 
destroy, but it cannot restore life ; call in the creative fac- 
ulties — call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have liv- 
ing figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures 
which ever lived before. The high faith in which Love 
and Intellect can alone unite in their fullness, has not yet 
found utterance in modern historians. 

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the 
recording of human affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius 
Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness of insight 
was compatible with intensity of feeling. He took no side ; 
he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Repub- 
lican, but he has left no sign whether he was either ; he 
appears to have sifted facts with scrupulous integrity : to 
administer his love, his scorn, his hatred, according only to 
individual merit : and his sentiments are rather felt by the 
reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits, than ex- 
pressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing 
into things was only possible to him, because there was no 
party left with which he could determinedly side, and no 
wide spirit alive in Rome through which he could feel. 
The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had gone away to 
seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of 
decaying institutions ; a stage where men and women, as 
they themselves were individually base or noble, played 
over their little parts. Life indeed was come into the 
world, was working in it, and silently shaping the old dead 
corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to 
it once only, in one brief scornful chapter ; and the most 
poorly gifted of those forlorn biographers whose unreason- 
ing credulity was piling up the legends of St. Mary and 



The Lives of the Saints. 449 

the Apostles, which now drive the ecclesiastical historian 
to desjDair, knew more, in his divine hope and faith, of the 
real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the 
keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to con- 
template them. 

And now having in some degree cleared the ground of 
difficulties, let us go back to the " Lives of the Saints." If 
Bede tells us lies about St. Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his 
stories ; but we will not call Bede a liar, even though he 
prefaces his life with a declaration that he has set down 
nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evi- 
dence. We are driven to no such alternative ; our canons 
of criticism are different from Bede's, and so are our no- 
tions of probability. Bede would expect a priori, and 
would therefore consider as sufficiently attested by a con- 
sent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses 
would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. 
We will call Bede a liar only if he put forward his picture 
of St. Cuthbert as a picture of a life which he considered 
admirable and excellent, as one after which he was en- 
deavoring to model his own, and which he held up as a 
pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider 
it admirable at all, when he was making no effi)rt at the 
austerities which he was lauding. The histories of the 
saints are written as ideals of a Christian life ; they have 
no elaborate and beautiful forms ; single and straight- 
forward as they are, — if they are not this they are noth- 
ing. For fourteen centuries the religious mind of the 
Catholic world threw them out as its form of hero-wor- 
ship, as the heroic patterns of a form of human life which 
each Christian within his own limits was endeavoring to 
realize. The first martyrs and confessors were to those 
poor monks what the first Dorian conquerors were in the 
war songs of Tyrtaeus, what Achilles and Ajax and Aga- 
memnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung 
or read ; or, in more modern times, what the Knights of 

29 



450 The Lives of the Saints. 

the Round Table were in the halls of the Norman c:istles. 
The Catholic mind was expressing its conception of the 
highest human excellence ; and the result is that immense 
and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle heroes, too, 
the inspiration lies in the universal idea ; the varieties of 
character (with here and there an exception) are slight 
and unimportant ; the object being to create examples for 
universal human imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were 
equally true to the spirit of chivalry ; and Patrick on the 
mountain, or Antony in the desert, are equal models of 
patient austerity. The knights fight with giants, enchant- 
ers, robbers, unknightly nobles, or furious wild beasts ; the 
Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. 
The knight leaves the comforts of home in quest of ad- 
ventures, the saint in quest of penance, and on the bare 
rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues the devil in his 
flesh with prayers and penances ; and so alien is it all to 
the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, 
that he either rejects such stories altogether as monks* 
impostures, or receives them with disdainful wonder, as 
one more shameful form of superstition with which human 
nature has insulted Heaven and disgraced itself 

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of 
monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that there 
really was such a thing ; there is no doubt about it. If 
the particular actions told of each saint are not literally 
true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many 
centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have 
led. We have got a notion that the friars were a snus^, 
comfortable set, after all ; and the life in a monastery 
pretty much like that in a modern university, where the old 
monks' language and affectation of unworldliness does 
somehow contrive to coexist with as large a mass of bodily 
enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very 
likely this was the state into which many of the monasteries 
had fallen in the fifteenth century. It was a symptom of 



The Lives of the Saints. 451 

a very rapid disorder which had set in among them, and 
which promptly terminated in dissolution. But long, long 
ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or 
foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make them- 
selves a very hard life of it ; and the legend only exceeded 
the reality in being a very slightly idealized portrait. We 
are not speaking of the miracles ; that is a wholly different 
question. When men knew little of the order of Nature, 
whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at 
once set down to influences beyond Nature and above 
it ; and so long as there were witches and enchanters, 
strong with the help of the bad powers, of course the 
especial servants of God would not be left without graces 
to outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were 
many other reasons why the saints should work miracles. 
They had done so under the old dispensation, and there 
was no obvious reason why Christians should be worse 
off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the 
modern phrase, which is beginning to savor a little of cant, 
that the highest natural is the highest supernatural, nev- 
ertheless natural facts permit us to be so easily familiar 
with them, that they have an air of commonness ; and 
when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a 
disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not 
the chief thing ; nor ever were they so. Men did not be- 
come saints by working miracles, but they worked miracles 
because they had become saints ; and the instructiveness 
and value of their lives lay in the means which they had 
used to make themselves what they were ; and as we said, 
in this part of the businiess there is unquestionable basis of 
truth — scarcely even exaggeration. We have document- 
ary evidence, which has been filtered through the sharp 
ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men (and 
those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind 
and vast influence in their days) conducted themselves, 
where myth has no room to enter. We know something of 



452 The Lives of the Saints. 

the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket ; and there was another 
poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not easily 
outrun ; he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded 
together to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but 
one little word, and it fell among them like the spear of 
Cadmus ; the strong ones turned their hands against each 
other, and the armies melted away ; and the proudest mon- 
arch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter 
niglfts in the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably 
for forgiveness. Or again, to take a fairer figure. There 
is a poem extant, the genuineness of which, we believe, has 
not been challenged, composed by Columbkill, commonly 
called St. Columba. He was a hermit in Arran, a rocky 
island in the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay ; from which he 
was summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner 
which appeared to him to be a Divine call, to go away and 
be Bishop of lona. The poem is a " Farewell to Arran," 
which he wrote on leaving it ; and he lets us see some- 
thing of a hermit's life there. " Farewell," he begins (we 
are obliged to quote from memory), " a long farewell to 
thee, Arran of my heart. Paradise is with thee ; the gar- 
den of God within the sound of thy bells. The angels 
love Arran. Each day an angel comes there to join in its 
services." And then he goes on to describe his " dear 
cell," and the holy happy hours which he had spent there, 
" with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and 
the sea-spray hanging on his hair." Arran is no better 
than a wild rock. It is strewed over with the ruins which 
may still be seen of the old hermitages ; and at their best 
they could have been but such places as sheep would hud- 
dle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which 
would pierce through the chinks of the walls. 

Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are 
silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same touch- 
ing story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a mon- 
astery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters, 



The Lives of the Saints. 458 

rows of cellars half under-ground, low. damp, and wretched- 
looking ; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement ; 
a roof from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and 
always must have kept up) a perpetual ooze ; for a window 
a narrow slip in the wall, through which the cold and the 
wind find as free an access as the light. Such- as they are, 
a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in 
them ; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of phi- 
lanthropic tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. 
The stranger perhaps supposes that they were the very 
dungeons of which he has heard such terrible things. He 
asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks' 
dormitories. Yes ; there on that wet soil, with that dripping 
roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor 
men. Through winter frost, through rain and storm, through 
summer sunshine, generation after generation of them, 
there they lived and prayed, and at last lay down and died. 
It is all gone now — gone as if it had never been ; and 
it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would 
have been mischievous, to revive a devotional interest in 
the Lives of the Saints. It would have produced but one 
more unreality in an age already too full of such. No one 
supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived ; 
that any man, however earnest in his religion, would have 
gone looking for earth floors and wet dungeons, or wild 
islands to live in, when he could get any thing better. 
Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more self-indul- 
gent ; at any rate we are something which divides us from 
mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf, which this 
age or this epoch will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, 
these modern hagiologists, however wrongly they went to 
work at it, had detected, and were endeavoring to fill, a 
very serious blank in our educational system ; a very 
serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must 
contrive to get filled if the education of character is ever 
to be more than a name with us. To try and teach people 



454 . The Lives of the Saints. 

how to live without giving them examples in which our 
rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to draw by the 
rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without designs 
in which to study the effects ; or to write verse by the laws 
of rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme 
and metre are exhibited. It is a principle which we have 
forgotten, and it is one which the old Catholics did not for- 
get. We do not mean that they set out with saying to 
themselves, " We must have examples, we must have 
ideals ; " very likely they never thought about it at all ; love 
for their holy men, and a thirst to know about them, pro- 
duced the histories ; and love unconsciously working gave 
them the best for which they could have wished. The boy 
at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining 
himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which 
he had devoted himself, the old one halting on toward the 
close of his pilgrimage, — all of them had before their 
eyes, in the legend of the patron saint, a personal realiza- 
tion of all they were trying after ; leading them on, beckon- 
ing to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their 
difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, 
as he had trod that hard path before them. It was as if 
the Church was forever saying to them : — "' You have 
doubts and fears, and trials and temptations, outward and 
inward ; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the burden of 
your sin. Here was one who, like you, in this very spot, 
under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the 
same hills and woods and rocks and rivers, was tried like 
you, tempted like you, sinned like you ; but here he prayed, 
and persevered, and did penance, and washed out his sins ; 
he fought the fight, he vanquished the Evil One, he 
triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in 
heaven. The same ground which yields you your food, 
once supplied him ; he breathed, and lived, and felt, and 
died here ; and now, from his throne in the sky, he is still 
looking lovingly down on his children, making intercession 



The Lives of the Saints. 455 

for you that you may have grace to follow him, that hy and 
by he may himself offer you at God's throne as his own." 
It is impossible to measure the influence which a personal 
reality of this kind must have exercised on the mind, thus 
daily and hourly impressed upon it through a life ; there is 
nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain 
after ; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. 
The saint's bones are under the altar ; nay, perhaps his 
very form and features undissolved. Under some late 
abbot the coffin may have been opened and the body seen 
without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, 
and the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a 
miracle. Daily some incident of his story is read aloud, 
or spoken of, or preached upon. In quaint beautiful forms 
it lives in light in the long chapel windows ; and in the 
summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendor, gleams 
down on the congregation as they pray, or streams in mys- 
terious tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft 
celestial glory, and shining as he shines in heaven. Alas, 
alas ! where is it all gone ? 

We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide 
question, what possibly may have been the meaning of so 
large a portion of the human race, and so many centuries 
of Christianity, having been surrendered and seemingly 
sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If 
right once, then it is right now ; if now worthless, then it 
could never have been more than worthless ; and the 
energies which spent themselves on it were like corn sown 
upon the rock, or substance given for that which is not 
bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our 
facts. Here is an enormous fact which there is no evad- 
ing. It is not to be slurred over with indolent generalities, 
with unmeaning talk of superstition, of the twilight of the 
understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery credulity ; it 
is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy 
has yet been born which can deal with it ; one of the solid, 



456 The Lives of the Saints. 

experienced facts in the story of mankind whicli must be 
accepted and considered with that respectful deference 
which all facts claim of their several sciences, and which 
will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing it to have 
a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We 
must remember that the men who wrote these stories, and 
who practiced these austerities, were the same men who 
composed our liturgies, who built our churches and our 
cathedrals — and the Gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on the 
whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of 
man has as yet thrown out of itself If there be any such 
thing as a philosophy of history, real or jjossible, it is in 
virtue of there being certain progressive organizing laws in 
which the fretful lives of each of us are gathered into and 
subordinated in some larger unity, through which age is 
linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expand- 
ing and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of 
any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance, 
and definite forms of thought working through long historic 
periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws — imply a 
distinct step in human progress. Something previously 
unrealized is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of 
mankind. 

Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and 
over it, to make assurance sure, and makes good her ground 
with wearying repetition. A single section of a short paper 
is but a small space to enter on so vast an enterprise ; 
nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured 
as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may 
possibly have meant. 

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the 
world, whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the 
ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite ; as 
one verges into one extreme, the other will verge into the 
contrary. In those rough times the law was the sword ; 
animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart which 



The Lives of the Saints. 457 

guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded ; 
and monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would 
be the destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. 
The war hero in the battle or the tourney-yard might be 
taken as the apotheosis of the fleshy man ; the saint in 
the desert, of the spiritual. 

But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at 
all only partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not 
contradictories ; they are the complements in the perfect 
character ; and in the Middle Ages, as in all ages of genuine 
earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each other. 
There were warrior saints and saintly warriors ; and those 
grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral 
aisles were something higher than only one more form 
of the beast of prey. Monasticism represented something 
more positive than a protest against the world. We believe 
it to have been the realization of the infinite loveliness 
and beauty of personal purity. 

In the earlier civilization, the Greeks, however genuine 
their reverence for the gods, do not seem to have supjDosed 
any part of their duty to the gods to consist in keeping 
their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was their sense of 
beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with all 
their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of 
moral excellence when manifested, as fortitude, or devotion 
to liberty and to home, they had little or no idea of what we 
mean by morality. With a few rare exceptions, pullution, 
too detestable to be even named among ourselves, was of 
familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest men ; 
was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman ; and was 
not supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, in- 
compatible, with any of those especial excellences which we 
so admire in the Greek character. 

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the 
republic), there was a sufiiciently austere morality. A 
public officer of state, whose business was to inquire into 



458 The Lives of the Saints. 

the private lives of the citizens, and to iDiinish offenses 
against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only 
once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and 
there has been none since, with sufficient virtue to endure 
it. But the Roman morality was not lovely for its own 
sake, nor excellent in itself It was obedience to law, prac- 
ticed and valued, loved for what resulted from it, for the 
strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved 
for itself The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost 
brutal ; and it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as 
long as the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon 
as that energy grew slack — when the religion was no 
longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in, and 
there was no more danger to face, and the world was at 
their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind ; there 
was no loveliness in virtue to make it desired ; and the 
Rome of the Caesars presents, in its later ages, a picture of 
enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal desire, with 
means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as little 
as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity. 
Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise 
enough of the wise man whose passions and whose appe- 
tites are trained into obedience to reason. But this is no 
more than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got 
itself expressed in words when men were tired of the 
reality. Tt involves no sense of sin. If sin could be in- 
dulged without weakening self-command, or without hurt- 
ing other people, Roman philosophy would have nothing to 
say against it. 

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. 
Without speculating on the why, they felt that indulgence 
of animal passion did, in fact, pollute them, and so much 
the more, the more it was deliberate. Philosophy, g-iding 
into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe, giving 
the spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and 
incurably evil ; and looking forward to the time when the 



The Lives of the Saints, 459 

spirit should be emancipated from the body, as the begin- 
ning of, or as the return to, its proper existence, a man 
like Plotinus took no especial care what became the mean- 
while of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned, sin 
was its element ; it could not do other than sin ; purity of 
conduct could not make the body clean, and no amount of 
bodily indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit — a 
very comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various 
disguises, has appeared a good many times on the earth. 
But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the 
body to God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the 
material world conquered from the appetites and lusts, and 
from the devil whose abode they were. This was the 
meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the penances and 
night-watchings ; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the 
tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in 
the flesh, and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so 
much as one corrupt thought. 

And they may have been absurd and extravagant. 
When the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men are 
very apt to be extravagant. If, in the recoil from IMani- 
cheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus purified 
had contracted supernatural virtue and could work mira- 
cles, they had not sufliciently attended to the facts, and so 
far are not unexceptionable witnesses to them. Neverthe- 
less they did their work, and in virtue of it we are raised 
to a higher stage — we are lifted forward a mighty step 
which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not 
the whole for which we have to care : it is but one feature 
in the ideal character of man. The monks may have 
thought it was all, or more nearly all than it is ; and there- 
fore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and emascu- 
late. Yet it is with life as it is with science ; generations 
of men have given themselves exclusively to single 
branches, which, when mastered, form but a little section 
in a cosmic philosophy ; and in life, so slow is progress, it 



460 The Lives of the Saints, 

may take a thousand years to make good a single step. 
"Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to 
speak in large language, and remember the numbers of 
individual souls who have been at work at the process ; 
but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration of the 
race ? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering 
into the grave ? Is it in nursery, in school-room, or in 
opening manhood ? Who knows ? It is enough for us to 
be sure of our steps when we have taken them, and thank- 
fully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it 
is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any 
character which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we 
require, not greatness only, but goodness; and not .that 
goodness only which begins and ends in conduct correctly 
regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure feeling 
for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and sus- 
ceptible as woman's modesty. 

So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this 
matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow 
in the crust of a soil which hitherto the historians have 
been contented to leave in its barrenness. If they are 
conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they 
look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of 
modern Christianity, they either revile the superstition or 
pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the 
nature of religion — and, loud in their denunciations of 
priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral 
with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the 
scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life 
of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, 
with such good or bad success as was given them, to carry 
Christ's cross along their journey through life, they set it 
by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor 
commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not 
do. Mankind have not been so long on this planet alto- 
gether that we can allow so large a chasm to be scooped 
out of their spiritual existence. 



The Lives of the Saints. 461 

We intended to leave our readers with something lighter 
than all this in the shape of literary criticism, and a few- 
specimens of the biographical style ; in both of these we 
must now, however, be necessarily brief. Whoever is 
curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals, 
should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and 
universally never read a late life when he can command an 
early one ; for the genius in them is in the ratio of their 
antiquity, and, like river-water, is most pure nearest to the 
fountain. We are lucky in possessing several specimens 
of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the 
same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the 
unnumbered lives of St. Bride, three are left ; out of the 
sixty-six of St. Patrick, there are eight ; the first of each 
belonging to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth. 
The earliest in each instance are in verse ; they belong to 
a time when there was no one to write such things, and 
were popular in form and popular in their origin. The 
flow is easy, the style graceftil and natural ; but the step 
from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal ; the 
imagination is ossified, and we exchange the exuberance 
of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic record of fact 
without reality, and fiction without grace. The marvelous 
in the poetical lives is comparatively slight ; the after-mira- 
cles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets' 
metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, 
human beauty in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for 
instance, of " St. Bride's Hymn " are of high merit, as may, 
perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a translation : — 

"Bride the queen, she loved not the world; 
She floated on the waves of the world 
As the sea-bh-d floats upon the billow. 

" Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps 
In the far land of her captivity, 
Mourning for her child at home." 

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning 
of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage ! 



462 The Lives of the Saints. 

The poetical " Life of St. Patrick," too, is full of fine, 
wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd 
on the hills of Down, and there is a legend, well told, of 
the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving a gigantic 
footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into 
heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remark- 
able natural feature of the spot ; as it is first told, a shad- 
owy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is 
more than a vision of the boy ; but in, the later prose all is 
crystalline ; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity 
of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again, 
when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the 
dead Celts to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natu- 
ral force, and we have a long, weary list of literal deaths 
and literal raisings. So in many ways the freshness and 
individuality was lost with time. The larger saints swal- 
lowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits ; 
chasms were supplied by an ever-ready fancy ; and, like 
the stock of good works laid up for general use, there was 
a stock of miracles ever ready when any defect was to be 
supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the pro- 
gressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a 
mountain side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its 
path, fact or legend, apj^ropriate or inai3propriate — some- 
times real jewels of genuine old tradition, sometimes the 
debris of the old creeds and legends of heathenism ; and 
on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and was 
dashed in pieces on the Reformation. 

One more illustration shall serve as evidence of what the 
really greatest, most vigorous minds in the twelfth century 
could accept as possible or probable, which they could re- 
late (on what evidence we do not know) as really ascer- 
tained facts. We remember something of St. Anselm : 
both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unques- 
tionably among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. 
Here is a story which Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. 



The Lives of the Saints. 463 

Kieran. The saint, with thirty of his companions, was 
preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan prhice ; 
and, disregarditig all orders to be quiet or to leave the coun- 
try, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even 
in the ears of the prince himself. Things took their natu- 
ral course. Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard 
of soldiers was sent, and the saint and his little band were 
decapitated. The scene of the execution was a wood, and 
the heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves 
and the wild birds. 

But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the 
Church in the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by 
Divine Providence to preserve the bodies of these saints from prof- 
anation. The trunk of Kieran rose from the ground, and select- 
ing first his own head, and carrying it to a stream, and there 
carefully washing it, and afterwards performing the same sacred 
office for each of his companions, giving each body its own head, 
he dug graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried 
himself. 

It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming 
Anselni's authorship ; and there is no reason why the 
authorship should not be his. Out of the heart come the 
issues of evil and of good, and not out of the intellect or 
the understanding. Men are not good or bad, noble or 
base — thank God for it! — as they judge well or ill of 
the probabilities of Nature, but as they love God and hate 
the devil. And yet the story is instructive. We have 
heard ^rave good men — men of intellect and influence — 
with all the advantages of modern science, learning, ex- 
perience, — men who would regard Anselm with sad and 
serious pity, — yet tell us stories, as having flillen within 
their own experience, of the marvels of mesmerism, to the 
full as ridiculous (if any thing is ridiculous) as this of the 
poor decapitated Kieran. 

Mutato nomine, de te 
Fabula narratur. 



464 The Lives of the Saints. 

We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn 
away and straightway forget what manner of men we are. 
The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of 
faith. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

1850. 



From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the "Acta 
Sanctorum " to the " Representative Men ; " so far in 
seven centuries we have travelled. The races of the old 
Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite Saurians ; 
and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are 
to look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves. 

The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the skeptic, the 
man of the world, the writer ; these are the present moral 
categories, the summa genera of human greatness as Mr. 
Emerson arranges them. From every point of view an 
exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to begin 
with, except one ; and thought is but a jDOor business com- 
pared to action. Saints did not earn canonization by the 
number of their folios ; and if the necessities of the times 
are now driving our best men out of action into philosophy 
and verse-making, so much the worse for them and so 
much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 
" the man of the world," is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the 
least a person, as we are most of us at present feeling, 
whose example the world desires to see followed. Mr. 
Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own 
side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen 
but a poor compliment by coming exclusively to Europe 
for his heroes ; and he would be doing us in Europe more 
real good by a great deal if he would tell us something of 
the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to 
30 



466 Representative Men. 

let that pass ; it is not our business here to quarrel either 
with him or his book ; and the book stands at the head of 
our article rather because it presents a very noticeable de- 
ficiency of which its writer is either unaware or careless. 
These six predicables, as the logician would call them, 
what are they ? Are they ultimate genera refusing to be 
classified further? or is there any other larger type of 
greatness under which they fall ? In the naturalist's cata- 
logue, poet, skeptic, and the rest will all be classified as 
men — man being an intelligible entity. Has Mr. Emer- 
son any similar clear idea of great man or good man ? If 
so, where is he ? what is he ? It is desirable that we 
should know. Men will not get to heaven because they 
lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that 
supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, 
unqualified with any further differential Is there any 
such? and if there be, where is the representative of this? 
It may be said that the generic man exists nowhere in an 
ideal unity — that if considered at all, he must be ab- 
stracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, 
tame or savage. So if we would know what a great man 
or a good man means, we must look to some specific line 
in which he is good and abstract our general idea. And 
that is very well, provided we know what we are about ; 
provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the 
essential idea distinctly out before ourselves, without en- 
tanglino; ourselves in the accidents. Human excellence, 
after all the teaching of the last eighteen hundred years, 
ought to be something j^alpable by this time. It is the 
one thingf which we are all tauoht to seek and to aim at 
forming in ourselves ; and if representative men xire good 
for any thing at all, it can only be, not as they represent 
merely curious combinations of phenomena, but as they 
illustrate us in a completely realized form, what we are, 
every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. 
It is not the " great man " as " man of the world " that we 



Representative Men. 467 

care for, but the " man of the world " as a "great man " — 
which is a very different thing. Having to live in this 
world, how to live greatly here is the question for us ; not 
how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly 
mould. There may be endless successful " men of the 
world " who are mean or little enough all the while ; and 
the Emersonian attitude will confuse success with great- 
ness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So it is 
with every thing which man undertakes and works in. 
Life has grown complicated ; and for one employment in 
old times there are a hundred now. But it is not they 
which are any thing, but we. We are the end, they are 
but the means, the material — like the clay, or the marble, 
or the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The 
form is every thing ; and what is the form ? From nursery 
to pulpit every teacher rings on the one note — be good, 
be noble, be men. What is goodness then ? and what is 
nobleness ? and where are the examples ? We do not say 
that there are none. God forbid ! That is not what we 
are meaning at all. If the earth had ceased to bear men 
pleasant in God's sight, it would have passed away like the 
cities in the plain. But who are they ? which are they ? 
how are we to know them ? They are our leaders in this 
life campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would 
follow them, and save ourselves many and many a fall, and 
many an enemy whom we could have avoided, if we had 
known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so simple, 
when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and 
such poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding follow- 
ers. In art and science we can detect the charlatan, but 
in life we do not recognize him so readily — we do not rec- 
ognize the charlatan, and we do not recognize the true man. 
Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or. a pirate ; and fifty of 
the best men among us are likely to have fifly opinions on 
the merits of Elizabeth or Cromwell. 

But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The com- 



468 Representative Men. 

mandments are simple. It is not that people do not know, 
but that they will not act up to what they know. We hear 
a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere ; and of 
course, as every body's experience will tell him, there is a 
great deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But 
there are two sorts of duty, positive and negative ; what we 
ought to do, and what we ought not to do. To the latter 
of these, conscience is pretty much awake ; but by cun- 
ningly concentrating its attention on one side of the mat- 
ter, conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any 
other sort exists at all. " Doino- wrong; " is breaking; a 
commandment which forbids us to do some particular 
thing. That is all the notion which in common language 
is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, com- 
mit adultery, or break the Lord's Day — these are the 
commandments ; very simple, doubtless, and easy to be 
known. But, after all, what are they ? They are no more 
than the very first and rudimental conditions of goodness. 
Obedience to these is not more than a small part of what 
is required of us ; it is no more than the foundation on 
which the superstructure of character is to be raised. To 
go through life, and plead at the end of it that we have not 
broken any of these commandments, is but what the un- 
profitable servant did, who kept his talent carefully un- 
spent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his useless- 
ness. Suppose these commandments obeyed — what then? 
It is but a small portion of our time which, we will hope, is 
spent in resisting temptation to break them. What are 
we to do with the rest of it ? Or suppose them (and this 
is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God and love 
of our neighbor. Suppose we know that it is our duty to 
love our neighbor as ourselves. What are we to do, then, 
for our neighbor, besides abstaining from doing him in- 
jury ? The saints knew very well what tJiey were to do ; 
but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different direction ; and 
it does not appear that we have found them. " We have 



Representative Men. 469 

duties so positive to our neighbor," says B-ishop Butler, 
" that if we give more of our time and of our attention to 
ourselves and our own matters than is our just due, we are 
taking what is not ours, and are guilty of fraud." What 
does Bishop Butler mean ? It is easy to answer gener- 
ally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to 
answer at all. The modern world says, — " Mind your 
own business, and leave others to take care of theirs ; " 
and whoever among us aspires to more than the negative 
abstaininor from wron^, is left to his own guidance. There 
is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which 
shall be to him what the heroes were to the young Greek 
or Roman, or the martyrs to the Middle Age Christian. 
There is neither track nor footprint in the course which he 
will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale, the hill- 
side which he is climbing is strewed with black stones 
mocking at him with their thousand voices. "We have 
no moral criterion, no idea, no counsels of perfection ; and 
surely this is the reason why education is so little pros- 
perous with us ; because the only education worth any 
thing is the education of character, and we. cannot educate 
a character unless we have some notion- of what Ave would 
form. Young men, as we know, are more easily led than 
driven. It is a very old story that to forbid this and that 
(so curious and contradictory is our nature) is to stimulate 
a desire to do it. But place before a boy a figure of a 
noble man ; let the circumstances in which he has earned 
his claim to be called noble be such as the boy himself 
sees around himself; let him see this man rising over his 
temptation, and following life victoriously and beautifully 
forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no 
threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it. 

People complain of the sameness in the " Lives of the 
Saints." It is that very sameness which is the secret of 
their excellence. There is a sameness in the heroes of the 
" Iliad ; " there is a sameness in the historical heroes of 



470 Representative Men, 

Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best 
with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best 
with the same circumstances, of course grow like each 
other. And so with our own age — if we really could 
have the lives of our best men written for us (and written 
well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was 
on which they should insist), they would be just as like 
each other too, and would for that reason be of such infi- 
nite usefulness. They would not be like the old Ideals. 
Times are changed ; they were one thing, we have to be 
another — their enemies are not ours. There is a moral 
metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lin- 
eament of form or feature remains identical ; yet surely 
not because less is demanded of us — not less, but more — 
more, as we are again and again told on Sundays from the 
pulpits ; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 
" more " consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is 
that we are to work in the spirit of love ; but we are still 
left to generalities, while action divides and divides into 
ever smaller details. It is as if the Church said to the 
painter or to the musician whom she was training, you 
must work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth ; 
and then adding, that the Catholic painting or the Catho- 
lic music was what he was not to imitate, supposed that 
she had sent him out into the world equipped fully for his 
enterprise. 

And what comes of this ? Emersonianism has come, 
modern hagiology has come, and Ainsworth novels and 
Bulwer novels, and a thousand more unclean spirits. We 
have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan has swept 
the house and garnished it ; but as yet we do not see any 
symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there 
may be worse states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof 
of the utter spiritual disintegration into which we have 
fallen, it would be enough that we have no biographies. 
We do not mean that we have no written lives of our fel- 



Representative Men. 471 

low creatures ; there are enough and to spare. But not 
any one is there in which the ideal tendencies of this age 
can be discerned in their true form ; not one, or hardly 
any one, which we could place in a young man's hands, 
with such warm confidence as would let us say of it, — 
" Read that ; there is a man — such a man as you ought 
to be ; read it, meditate on it ; see what he was, and how 
he made himself what he was, and try and be yourself like 
him." This, as we saw lately, is what CathoHcism did. It 
had its one broad type of perfection, which in countless 
thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself 
— a type of character not especially belonging to any one 
profession ; it was a type to which priest and layman, 
knight or bishop, king or peasant, might equally aspire*' 
men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all sorts attained 
to it ; and as fast as she had realized them (so to say), the 
Church took them in her arms, and held them up before 
the world as fresh and fresh examples of victory over the 
devil. This is what that Church was able to do, and it is 
what we cannot do ; and yet, till we can learn to do it, no 
education which we can offer has any chance of prospering. 
Perfection is not easy ; it is of all things most difficult ; 
difficult to know and difficult to practice. Rules of life 
will not do ; even if our analysis of life in all its possible 
forms were as complete as it is in fact rudimentary, they 
would still be inefficient. The philosophy of the thing 
might be understood, but the practice would be as far off 
as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only 
profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your 
mathematician, or your man of science, may discourse ex- 
cellently on the steam-engine, yet he cannot make one ; he 
cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman in 
the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of 
expansion, or of atmospheric pressure ; he guides his hand 
upon the turncock, he practices his eye upon the index, 
and he leaves the science to follow when the practice has 



472 Representative Men. 

become mechanical. So it is with every thing which man 
learns to do ; and yet for the art of arts, the trade of 
trades, for life, we content ourselves with teaching our 
children the catechism and the commandments ; we preach 
them sermons on the good of being good, and the evil of 
being evil ; in our higher education we advance to the the- 
ory of habit and the freedom of the will ; and then, when 
failure follows failure, ipsa experientia reclamanfe, we hug 
ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the 
fa lit is not ours, that all which men could do we have 
d;me. The freedom of the will! — as if a blacksmith 
would ever teach a boy to make a horseshoe, by telling 
him he could make one if he chose. 

In setting out on our journey through life, we are like 
strangers set to find their way across a difficult and entan- 
gled country. It is not enough for us to know that others 
have set out as we set out, that others have faced the lions 
in the path and overcome them, and have arrived at last at 
the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us heart 
— but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that 
the difficulties are not insuperable. It is the track, which 
these otliers, these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, 
that we cry to have shown us ; not a mythic " Pilgrim's 
Progress," but a real path trodden in by real men. Here 
is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be 
chmbed ; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge 
in one place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in 
this forest, and wild beasts in that ; the tracks cross and 
recross, and, as in the old labyrinth, only one will bring us 
right. The age of the saints has passed ; they are no 
longer any service to us ; we must walk in their spirit, but 
not along their road ; and in this sense we say, that we 
have no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, 
which are of real service to us. It is the remarkable char- 
acteristic of the present time, as far as we know — a new 
phenomenon since history began to be written ; one more 



Representative Men. 473 

proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another 
era. In our present efforts at educating, we are like Avork- 
men setting about to make a machine which they know is 
to be composed of plates and joints, and wheels and screws 
and springs: — they temper their springs, and smooth their 
plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and screws, but 
having no idea of the machine in its combination, they 
either fasten them together at random, and create some 
monster of disjointed undirected force, or else pile the fin- 
ished materials into a heap together, and trust to some 
organic spirit in themselves which will shape them into 
unity. We do not know what we would be at. Make our 
children into men, says one — but what sort of men ? The 
Greeks were men, so were the Jews, so were the Romans, 
so were the old Saxons, the Normans, the Duke of Alva's 
Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These were all men, 
and strong men too ; yet all different, and all differently 
trained. " Into Christian men," say others : but the saints 
were Christian men ; yet the modern Englishmen have 
been offered the saints' biographies, and have with sufficient 
clearness expressed their opinion of them. 

Alas ! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed chil- 
dren of this world find their profit ; their idea does not 
readily forsake them. In their substantial theory of life, 
the business of man in it is to get on, to thrive, to prosper, 
to have riches in possession. They will have their little 
ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price 
in the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straight- 
forward — and therefore it is strong, and works its way. 
It works and will prevail for a time ; for a time — but not 
forever, unless indeed religion be all a dream, and our 
airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise age 
is the long-waited-for awakening. 

It would be a weary and odious business to follow out 
all the causes which have combined to bring us into our 
present state. Many of them lie deep down in the roots 



474 Representative Men, 

of humanity, and many belong to that large system ol 
moral causation which works through vast masses of man- 
kind — which, impressing peculiar and necessary features 
on the eras as they succeed, leaves individuals but a limited 
margin within which they may determine w^hat they will 
be. One cause, however, may be mentioned, which lies 
near the surface, and which for many reasons it may be 
advantageous to consider. At first thought it may seem 
superficial and captious ; but we do not think it will at the 
second, and still less at the third. 

Protestantism, and even Anglo-Protestantism, has not 
been without its great men. In their first fierce struggle 
for existence, these creeds gave birth to thousands whose 
names may command any rank in history. But alone of 
all forms of religion, past or present, and we will add (as 
we devoutly hope), to come (for in her present form, at 
least, the Church of England cannot long remain), Protest- 
antism knows not what to do with her own ofFsjDring ; she 
is unable to give them open and honorable recognition. 
Entangled in speculative theories of human depravity, of 
the worthiessness of the best which the best men can do, 
Protestantism is unable to say heartily of any one, " Here 
is a good man to be loved and remembered with rever- 
ence." There are no saints in the English Church. The 
English Church does not pretend to saints. Her children 
may live purely, holily, and beautifully, but her gratitude 
for them must be silent ; she may not thank God for them 
— she may not hold them up before her congregation. 
They may or they may not have been really good, but she 
may not commit herself to attributing a substantial value 
to the actions of a nature so corrupt as that of man. 
Among Protestants, the Church of England is the worst, 
for she is not wholly Protestant. In the utterness of the 
self-abnegation of the genuine Protestant there is some- 
thing approaching the heroic. But she, ambitious of being 
Catholic as well as Protestant, like that old Church of 



Representative Men. 475 

evil memory which would be neither hot nor cold, will 
neither wholly abandon merit, nor wholly claim it ; but 
halts on between two opinions, claiming and disclaiming, 
saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Ox- 
ford student being asked for the doctrine of the Anglican 
Church on good works, knew the rocks and whirlpools 
among which an unwary answer might involve him, and 
steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, 
with laudable caution, " A few of them would not do a man 
any harm." It is scarcely a caricature of the prudence of 
the Articles. And so at last it has come to this with us. 
The soldier can raise a column to his successful general ; 
the halls of the law courts are hung round with portraits 
of the ermined sages ; Newton has his statue, and Harvey 
and "Watt, in the academies of the sciences ; and each 
young aspirant after fame, entering for the first time upon 
the calling which he has chosen, sees high excellence 
highly honored ; sees the high career, and sees its noble 
ending, marked out each step of it in golden letters. But 
the Church's aisles are desolate, and desolate they must 
remain. There is no statue for the Christian. The empty 
niches stare out like hollow eye-sockets from the walls. 
Good men live in the Church and die in her, whose story 
written out or told would be of inestimable benefit, but she 
may not write it. She may speak of goodness, but not of 
the good man ; as she may speak of sin, but may not cen- 
sure the sinner. Her position is critical ; the Dissenters 
would lay hold of it. She may not do it, but she will do 
what she can. She cannot tolerate an image indeed, or a 
picture of her own raising ; she has no praise to utter at 
her children's graves, when their lives have witnessed to 
her teaching. But if others will bear the expense and will 
risk the sin, she will offer no objection. Her walls are 
naked. The wealthy ones among her congregation may 
adorn them as they please ; the splendor of a dead man's 
memorial shall be, not as his virtues were, but as his purse ; 



476 Representative Men. 

and his epitaph may be brilliant according as there are 
means to pay for it. They manage things better at the 
museums and the institutes. 

Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are 
other causes at work besides the neglect of churches ; the 
neglect itself being as much a result as a cause. There is 
a common dead level over the world, to which churches 
and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike con- 
demned. As it is here in England, so it is with the Amer- 
ican Emerson. The fault is not in them, but in the age 
of which they are no more than the indicators. We are 
passing out of old forms of activity into others new and on 
their present scale untried ; and how to work nobly in 
them is the one problem for us all. Surius will not profit 
us, nor the " Mort d' Arthur." Our calling is neither to the 
hermitage nor to the Round Table. Our work lies now in 
those peaceful occupations which, in ages called heroic, 
were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the 
slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It 
was the ignoble buroher who covered the sea with his 
ships, and raised up factories and workshops ; and how far 
such occupations influenced the character, how they could 
be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and 
beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while 
the atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so 
alien to them. Times have changed. The old hero wor- 
ship has vanished with the need of it ; but no other has 
risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the dark. 
The commonplaces of morality, the negative command- 
ments, general exhortations to goodness, while neither 
speaker nor hearer can tell what they mean by goodness — 
these are all which now remain to us ; and thrown into a 
life more complicated than any which the earth has yet ex- 
perienced, we are left to wind our way through the laby- 
rinth of its details without any clew except our own in- 
stincts, our own knowledge, our own hopes and desires. 



Representative Men, 477 

We complain of generalities ; we will not leave ourselves 
exposed to the same charge. We will mention a few of 
the thousand instances in which we cry for guidance and 
find none; instances on which those who undertake to 
teach us ought to have made up their minds. 

On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems 
to be something left remaining of the Catholic penitential 
system. Fasting is spoken of and abstinence, and some 
form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is necessarily- 
meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, 
and we may well smile at the exclusive claims of a church 
to the cure of our souls, who is unable to say what she 
thinks about it. Let us ask her living interpreters then, 
and what shall we get for an answer ? Either no answer 
at all, or contradictory answers ; angrily, violently, passion- 
ately contradictory. Among the many voices, what is a 
young man to conclude ? He will conclude naturally ac- 
cording to his inclination ; and if he chooses right, it will 
most likely be on a wrong motive. 

Again, courage is, on all hands, considered as an essen- 
tial of high character. Among all fine people, old and 
modern, wherever we are able to get an insight into their 
training system, we find it a thing particularly attended to. 
The Greeks, the Romans, the old Persians, our own nation 
till the last two hundred years, whoever of mankind have 
turned out good for any thing anywhere, knew very well, 
that, to exhort a boy to be brave without training him in it, 
would be like exhorting a young colt to submit to the bri- 
dle without breaking him in. Step by step, as he could 
bear it, the boy was introduced to danger, till his pulse 
ceased to be agitated, and he became familiarized with peril 
as his natural element. It was a matter of carefully con- 
sidered, thoroughly recognized, and organized education. 
But courage nowadays is not a paying virtue. Courage 
does not help to make money, and so we have ceased to 
care about it ; and boys are lefl to educate one another by 



478 Representative Men. 

their own semi-brutal instincts, in this, which is perhaps 
the most important of all features in the human character. 
Schools, as far as the masters are concerned witli them, are 
places for teaching Greek and Latin — that, and nothing 
more. At the universities, fox-hunting is, perhaps, the 
only discipline of the kind now to be found, and fox-hunt- 
ing, by forbidding it and winking at it, the authorities have 
contrived to place on as demoralizing a footing as ingfenu- 
ity could devise.-^ 

To pass from training to life. A boy has done with 
school and college ; he has become a man, and has to 
choose his profession. It is the one most serious step 
which he has yet taken. In most cases, there is no recall- 
ing it. He believes that he is passing through life to eter- 
nity ; that his chance of getting to heaven depends on 
what use he makes of his time ; he prays every day that he 
may be delivered from temptation ; it is his business to 
see that he does not throw himself into it. Now, every 
one of the many professions has a peculiar character of its 
own, which, with rare exceptions, it inflicts on those who 
follow it. There is the shopkeeper type, the manufticturer 
type, the lawyer type, the medical type, the clerical type, 
the soldier's, the sailor's. The nature of a man is, 

" Like the dyer's hand, 
Subdued to what it works in; " 

and we can distinguish with ease, on the slightest inter- 
course, to what class a grown person belongs. It is to be 
seen in his look, in his words, in his tone of thought, his 
voice, gesture, even in his handwriting ; and in every thing 
which he does. Every human employment has its espe- 
cial moral characteristic, its peculiar temptations, its pecul- 
iar influences — of a subtle and not easily analyzed kind, 
and only to be seen in their eflects. Here, therefore — 
here, if anywhere, we want Mr. Emerson with his represent- 
atives, or the Church with her advice and warning. But, 
1 Written 1850. 



Representative Men, 479 

in fact, what attempt do we see to understand any of this, 
or even to acknowledge it ; to master the moral side of the 
professions ; to teach young men entering them what they 
are to expect, what to avoid, or what to seek ? Where are 
the highest types — the pattern lawyer, and shopkeeper, 
and merchant ? Are they all equally favorable to excel- 
lence of character ? Do they offer equal opportunities? 
Which best suits this disposition, and which suits that ? 
Alns ! character is little thought of in the choice. It is 
rather, which shall I best succeed in ? Where shall I 
make most money ? Suppose an anxious boy to go for 
counsel to his spiritual mother ; to go to her, and ask her 
to guide him. Shall I be a soldier ? he says. What v\-ill 
she tell him ? This and no more — You may, without sin. 
Shall I be a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, tiadesman, 
engineer ? Still the same answer. But which is best ? 
he demands. We do not know : we do not know. There 
is no guilt in either ; you may take which you please, pro- 
vided you go to church regularly, and are honest and good. 
If he is foolish enough to persist further, and ask in what 
honesty and goodness consist in his especial department 
(whichever he selects), he will receive the same answer ; in 
other words, he will be told to give every man his due, and 
be left to find out for himself in what " his due " consists. 
It is like an artist telling his pupil to put the lights and 
shadows in their due places, and leaving it to the pupil's 
ingenuity to interpret such instructive directions. 

One more instance of an obviously practical kind. 
Masters, few people will now deny, owe certain duties to 
their workmen beyond payment at the competition price 
for their labor, and the workmen owe somethincr to their 

o 

masters beyond making their own best bargain. Courtesy, 
on the one side, and respect on the other, are at least due ; 
and wherever human beinijs are brouoht in contact, a num- 
ber of reciprocal obligations at once necessarily arise out 
of the conditions of their position. It is this question 



480 Representative Men. 

which at the present moment is convulsing an entire branch 
of English trade. It is this question which has shaken the 
Continent like an earthquake, and yet it is one which, the 
more it is thought about, the more clearly seems to refuse 
to admit of being dealt with by legislation. It is a question 
for the Gospel and not for the law. The duties are of 
the kind which it is the business, not of the State, but 
of the Church, to look to. Why is the Church silent? 
There are duties ; let her examine them, sift them, prove 
them, and then point them out. Why not — why not ? 
Alas ! she cannot, she dare not give offense, and there- 
fore must find none. It is to be feared that we have a 
rough trial to pass through, before we find our way and 
understand our oblicrations. Yet far oif we seem to see a 
time when the lives, the actions of the really great, great 
good masters, great good landlords, great good working 
men, will be laid out once more before their several orders, 
laid out in the name of God, as once the saints' lives were ; 
and the same sounds shall be heard in factory and in 
counting-house as once sounded through abbey, chapel, 
and cathedral aisle, — " Look at these men ; bless God for 
them, and follow them." 

And let no one fear that, if such happy time were come, 
it would result in a tame and weary sameness ; that the 
beautiful variety of individual form would be lost, drilled 
away in regimental uniformity. Even if it were so, it need 
not be any the worse for us ; we are not told to develop 
our individualities, we are told to bear fruit. The poor 
vagabond, with all his individualities about him, if by luck 
he falls into the hands of the recruiting sergeant, finds 
himself, a year later, with his red coat and his twelve 
months' training, not a little the better for the loss of them. 
But such schooling as we have been speaking of will drill 
out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind, 
and will throw the strength of the nature into the develop- 
ment of the healthiest features in it. Far more, as things 



jRepresentative Men. 481 

now are, we see men sinking into sameness — an inorganic, 
unwholesome sameness, in which the higher nature is sub- 
dued, and the t7ian is sacrificed to the profession. The 
circumstances of his Ufe are his world ; and he sinks under 
them, he does not conquer them. If he has to choose be- 
tween the two, God's uniform is better than the world's. 
The first gives him freedom ; the second takes it from him. 
Only here, as in every thing, we must understand the nature 
of the element in which we work ; understand it ; under- 
stand the laws of it. Throw off the lower laws ; the selfish, 
debasing influences of the profession ; obey the higher ; 
follow love, truthfulness, manliness ; follow these first, and 
make the profession serve them ; and that is freedom ; 
there is none else possible for man. 

" Das Gesetz soil nur uns Freiheit geben; " 

and whatever individuahty is lost in the process, we may 
feel assured that the devil has too much to do with, to 
make us care to be rid of it. 

But how to arrive at this ? so easy as it is to suggest on 
paper, so easy to foretell in words. Raise the level of pub- 
lic opinion, we might say ; insist on a higher standard ; in 
the economist's language, increase the demand for good- 
ness, and the supply will follow ; or, at any rate, men will 
do their best. Until we require more of one another, more 
will not be provided. But this is but to restate the prob- 
lem in other words. How are we to touch the heart ; how 
to awaken the desire ? We believe that the good man, the 
great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really 
lovely ; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he 
more than any thing will move us ; and at least, we have a 
right to demand that the artificial hinderances which pre- 
vent our lifting him above the crowd, shall be swept away. 
He in his beautiful hfe is a thousand times more God's 
witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must 
not be concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the 
31 



482 Mepresentative Men, 

way of our sacred recognition of great men is more than 
any thing else the Protestant doctrine of good works. We 
do not forget what it meant when the world first heard of 
it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul, fling- 
ing off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the 
sickening parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the 
Roman Church had converted into stock, and dispensed 
for the benefit of the believers. This is not the place to 
pour out nausea on so poor, yet so detestable a farce. But 
it seems with all human matters, that as soon as spiritual 
truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for 
their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. 
The doctrine of good works was hurled away by an instinct 
of generous feeling, and this feeling itself has again become 
dead, and a fresh disease has followed upon it. Nobody 
(or, at least, nobody good for any thing) will lay a claim to 
merit for this or that good action which he may have done. 
Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the 
eagerness with which he will refuse all credit for it; he 
will cry out, with all his soul, '' Not unto us — not unto 
us." 

And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between 
man and man there is an infinite moral difference ; one is 
good, one is bad, another hovers between the two; the 
whole of our conduct to each other is necessarily governed 
by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the analogous 
question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of our- 
selves ; we know that we are but what God has given us 
grace to be — we did not make ourselves — we do not keep 
ourselves here — we are but what, in the eternal order of 
Providence, we were designed to be — exactly that and 
nothing else ; and yet we treat each other as responsible ; 
we cannot help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot elimi- 
nate his instincts ; his loves and hatreds seem rather to 
deepen in intensity of coloring as, logically, his creed should 
lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is useless, it is im- 



Representative Men, 483 

possible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon our 
earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our 
feelings by them ; men are good, men are bad, relatively to 
us and to our understandings if you will, but still really, 
and so they must be treated. 

There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist 
in railing at man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as 
if the best and the worst which comes of it were in God's 
sight equally without worth. These denunciations tend too 
fatally to realize themselves. Tell a man that no good 
which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it lie 
will take you at your word — most especially will the 
wealthy, comfortable, luxurious man, just the man who has 
most means to do good, and whom of all things it is most 
necessary to stinmlate to it. Surely we should not be 
afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts 
are too mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with 
doctrinal sophistry. We love the good man, we praise 
him, we admire him — we cannot help it ; and surely 
it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognizing it openly 
— thankfully, divinely recognizing it. If true at all, there 
is no truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical impor- 
tance to us ; and Protestantism must have lapsed from 
its once generous spirit, if it persists in imposing a dogma 
of its own upon our hearts, the touch of which is fatal as 
the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavors after 
excellence. 

" Drive out Nature with a fork, she ever comes running 
back ; " and while we leave out of consideration the re- 
ality, we are filling the chasm with inventions of our own. 
The only novels which are popular among us are those 
which picture the successful battles of modern men and 
women with modern life, which are imperfect shadows of 
those real battles which every reader has seen in some form 
or other, or has longed to see in his own small sphere. Tt 



484 Representative Men. 

shows where the craving lies if we had but the courage to 
meet it ; why need we fall back on imagination to create 
what God has created ready for us ? In every department 
of human life, in the more and the less, there is always one 
man who is the best, and one type of man which is the 
best, living and working his silent way to heaven in the 
very middle of us. Let us find this type then — let us 
see what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up 
their excellences into an acknowledged and open standard, 
of which they themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is 
there a landlord who is spending his money, not on pin- 
eries and hot-houses, but on schools, and wash-houses, and 
drains ; who is less intent on the magnificence of his own 
grand house, than- in providing cottages for his people 
where decency is possible ; then let us not pass him by 
with a torpid wonder or a vanishing emotion of pleasure — 
rather let us seize him and raise him up upon a pinnacle, 
that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps, their 
hearts may prick them ; and the world shall learn from 
what one man has done what they have a right to require 
that others shall do. 

So it might be throus^h the thousand channels of life. 
It should not be so difficult ; the machinery is ready, both 
to find your men and to use them. In theory, at least, 
every parish has its pastor, and the state of every soul is 
or ought to be known. We know not what turn things 
may take, or what silent changes are rushing on below 
us. Even while the present organization remains — but, 
alas ! no ; it is no use to urge a Church bound hand and 
foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any wholesome 
activity. If the teachers of the people really were the 
wisest and best and noblest men among us, this and a 
thousand other blessed things would follow from it ; till 
then let us be content to work and pray, and lay our hand 
to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to grasp. Cor- 



Representative Men. 485 

ruptio optimi est pessima ; the national Chinch as it ought 
to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a 
man whose body has the direction of his conscience we 
do not commonly consider in the most hopeful moral con- 
dition. 



REYNARD THE FOX." 



Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, jDro- 
pounds a singular theory. Declining the various solutions 
which have been offered to explain how a man supposed 
to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine 
of " The Prince," he has advanced a hypothesis of his 
own, which may or may not be true, as an interpretation of 
Machiavelli's character, but which, as an exposition of a 
universal ethical theory, is as questionable as what it 
is brought forward to explain. We will not show Lord 
Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted 
an elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may 
have been exercising his genius with a paradox, but the 
subject is not of the sort in which we can patiently permit 
such exercises. It is hard work with all of us to keep our- 
selves straight, even when we see the road with all plain- 
ness as it lies out before us ; and clever men must be good 
enough to find something else to amuse themselves with, 
instead of dusting our eyes with sophistry. 

According to this conception of human nature, the base- 
nesses and the excellences of mankind are no more than 
accidents of circumstance, the results of national feeling 
and national capabilities ; and cunning and treachery, and 
lying, and such other " natural defenses of the weak against 
the strong," are in themselves neither good nor bad, except 
as thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a 

1 Fraser''s Magazine^ 1852. 



Reynard the Fox, 487 

weak people, and they will be as much admired, and are as 
justly admirable ; they are to the full as compatible with 
the highest graces and most lofty features of the heart and 
intellect as any of those opposite so-called heroisms which 
we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolize 
the name. Cunning is the only resource of the feeble ; and 
why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a 
sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the 
strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's 
meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English 
understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be 
familiar to all of us in the characters of lago and Othello. 
To our Northern thought, the free and nol)le nature of the 
Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in 
the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, lago's 
keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admijable as 
Othello's daring appears to us, and Othello himself little 
better than a fool and a savage. It is but a change of 
scene, of climate, of the animal qualities of the frame, and 
evil has become good, and good has become evil. Now, 
our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has 
advanced a novel and mischievous theory : it was elabo- 
rated long ago in the finely tempered dialectics of the 
schools of Rhetoric at Athens ; and so long as such a 
phenomenon. as a cultivated rogue remains possible among 
mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any 
number of philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, how- 
ever, has it appeared with so little attempt at disguise. It 
has been left for questionable poets and novelists to idealize 
the rascal genus ; philosophers have escaped into the am- 
biguities of general propositions, and we do not remember 
elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker de- 
liberately laying two whole organic characters, with their 
vices and virtues in full life and bloom, side by side, asking 
himself which is best, and answering gravely that it is a 
matter of taste. 



488 Reynard the Fox, 

Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors ; 
he has shrank from no conclusion, and has looked directly 
into the very heart of the matter ; he has struck, as we 
believe, the very lowest stone of our ethical convictions, 
and declared that the foundation quakes under it. 

For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and 
wrong is wrong ? People in general accept it on authority ; 
but authority itself must repose on some ulterior basis ; and 
what is that ? Are we to say that in morals there is a sys- 
tem of primary axioms, out of which we develop our con- 
clusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life ? It 
does not appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with 
art than with geometry. The grace of Heaven gives us 
good men, and gives us beautiful creations ; and we, per- 
ceiving by the instincts within ourselves that celestial 
presence in the objects on which we gaze, find out for our- 
selves the laws which make them what they are, not by 
comparing them with any antecedent theory, but by careful 
analysis of our own impressions, by asking ourselves what 
it is which we admire in them, and by calling that good, 
and calling that beautiful. 

So, then, if admiration be the first fact — if the sense of 
it be the ultimate ground on which the after temple of 
morality, as a system, upraises itself — if we can be chal- 
lenged here on our own ground, and fail to make it good, 
what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream of a 
feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the skeptic's 
finger to point at with scorn. 

Bold and ably urged arguments against our own convic- 
tions, if they do not confuse us, will usually send us back 
over our ground to reexamine the strength of our posi- 
tions ; and if we are honest with ourselves, we shall very 
often find points of some uncertainty left unguarded, of 
which the show of the strength of our enemy will oblige us 
to see better to the defense. It was not without some 
shame, and much uneasiness, that, while we were ourselves 



Reynard the Fox. 489 

engaged in this process, full of indignation with Lord 
Macaulay, we heard a clear voice ringing in our ear, '• Who 
art thou that judgest another ? " and warning us of the 
presence in our own heart of a sympathy, which we could 
not " deny," with the sadly questionable hero of the German 
epic, '' Reynard the Fox." With our vulpine friend, we 
were on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed, we 
were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry 
could we justify ourselves, if not by the very same which 
we had just been so eagerly condemning ? And our con- 
science whispered to us that we had been swift to detect a 
fault in another, because it was the very fault to which, in 
our own heart of hearts, v/e had a latent leaning. 

Was it so indeed, then ? Was Reineke no better than 
lago? Was the sole difference between them, that the 
rates sacer who had sung the exploits of Reineke loved the 
wicked rascal, and entangled us in loving him ? It was a 
question to be asked. And yet we had faith enough in the 
straightforwardness of our own sympathies to feel sure that 
it must admit of some sort of answer. And, indeed, we 
rapidly found an answer satisfactory enough to give us 
time to breathe, in remembering that Reineke, with all his 
roguery, has no malice in him. It is not in his nature to 
hate ; he could not do it if he tried. The characteristic 
of lago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in 
evil as its proper element — which loves evil as good men 
love virtue. In calculations on the character of the Moor, 
lago despises Othello's unsuspicious trustingness as imbe- 
cility, while he hates him as a man because his nature is 
the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of his own. 
Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even 
Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his 
eyes out, if he had not been hungry; and that yaarpos 
avdyKVi, that craving of the stomach, makes a difference 
quite infinite. It is true that, like lago, Reineke rejoices 
in the exercise of his intellect ; the sense of his power and 



490 Reynard the Fox, 

the scientific employment of his time are a real delight to 
him ; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its own 
sake ; he is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the other 
animals venture to take liberties with him, he will repay 
them in their own coin, and get his quiet laugh at them 
at the same time ; but the object generally for which he 
lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and 
his family ; and, as the great moralist says, " It is better to 
be bad for something than for nothing." Badness generally 
is undesirable ; but badness in its essence, which may be 
called heroic badness, is gratuitous. 

But this first thought served merely to give us a mo- 
mentary relief from our alarm, and we determined we 
would sift the matter to the bottom, and no more expose 
ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage. We went 
again to the poem, with our eyes open, and our moral sense 
as keenly awake as a genuine wish to understand our feel- 
ings could make it. We determined that we would really 
know what we did feel and what we did not. We would 
not be lightly scared away from our friend, but neither 
would we any more allow our judgment to be talked down 
by that fluent tongue of his ; he should have justice from 
us, he and his biographer, as far as it lay with us to discern 
justice and to render it. 

And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem little 
less than impossible that we could find any conceivable at- 
tribute illustrated in Reineke's proceedings which we could 
dare to enter in our catalogue of virtues, and not blush to 
read it there. What sin is there in the Decalogue in which 
he has not steeped himself to the lips ? To the lips, shall 
we say ? nay, over head and ears — rolling and rollicking 
in sin. Murder, and theft, and adultery ; sacrilege, per- 
jury, lying — his very life is made of them. On he goes 
to the end, heaping crime on crime, and lie on lie, and at 
last, when it seems that justice, which has been so long 
vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, 



Reynard the Fox. 491 

there is a solemn appeal to Heaven, a challenge, a battle 
ordeal, in which, by means we may not venture even to 
whisper, the villain prospers, and comes out glorious, vic- 
torious, amidst the applause of a gazing world. To crown 
it all, the poet tells us that, under the disguise of the an- 
imal name and form, the world of man is represented,- 
and the true course of it ; and the idea of the book is, 
that we who read it may learn therein to discern betw^een 
good and evil, and choose the first and avoid the last. It 
seemed beyond the power of sophistry to whitewash Rei- 
neke, and the interest which still continued to cling to him 
seemed too nearly to resemble the unwisdom of the multi- 
tude, with whom success is the one virtue, and failure the 
only crime. 

It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises were 
too transparent to endure a moment's reflection, yet that 
they were so gracefully worn that such moment's reflection 
was not to be come at without an effort. Our imagination 
following the costume, did imperceptibly betray our judg- 
ment; we admired the human intellect, the ever-ready 
prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in 
the satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our 
own fellow-creatures ; but in our regard for the hero we 
forgot his humanity wherever it was his interest that we 
should forget it, and while we admired him as a man we 
judged him only a fox. We doubt whether it would have 
been possible, if he had been described as an open ac- 
knowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained 
our regard for him. Something or other in us, either 
real rightmindedness, or humbug, or hypocrisy, w^ould have 
obliged us to mix more censure with our likino- than most 
of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the 
dress of the fox throws us off our guard, and lets out a 
secret or two which we commonly conceal even from our- 
selves. When we have to pass an opinion upon bad people, 
who at the same time are clever and attractive, we say 



492 Reynard the Fox. 

rather what we think that we ought to feel than what we 
feel in reality ; while with Reineke, being but an animal, 
we forget to make ourselves up, and for once our genuine 
tastes show themselves freely. . Some degree of truth 
there undoubtedly is in this. But making all allowance 
for it — making all and over allowance for the trick which 
is passed upon our senses, there still remained a feeling un- 
resolved. The poem was not solely the apotheosis of a 
rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking an interest ; 
and it was not a satire merely on the world, and on the 
men whom the world delight to honor. There was still 
something which really deserved to be liked in Relneke, 
and what it was we had as yet failed to discover. 

" Two are better than one," and we resolved in our diffi- 
culty to try what our friends might have to say about it. 
The appearance of the Wurtemburg animals at the Exhi- 
bition came fortunately apropos to our assistance ; a few 
years ago it was rare to find a person who had read the 
Fox Epic ; and still more, of course, to find one whose 
judgment would be worth taking about it. But now the 
charming figures of Reineke himself, and the Lion King, 
and Isegrim, and Bruin, and Bellyn, and Hintze, and Grim- 
bart, had set all the world asking who and what they were, 
and the story began to get itself known. The old editions, 
which had long slept unbound in reams upon the shelves, 
began to descend and clothe themselves in screen and crim- 
son. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round the house- 
holds of England. Every body began to talk of Reineke ; 
and now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see 
whether we are alone in our liking — whether others share 
in this strange sympathy, or whether it be some unique and 
monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves. 

We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness, feeling 
our way first with fear and delicacy as conscious of our 
own delinquency, to gather judgments which should be 
wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if it proved 



Reynard the Fox. 493 

that we required correction, with whatever severity might 
be necessary. The result of this labor of ours was not a 
little surprising. We found that women invariably, with 
that clear moral instinct of theirs, at once utterly repro- 
bated and detested our poor Reynard ; detested the hero 
and detested the bard who sang of him with so much sym- 
pathy ; while men we found almost invariably feeling just 
as we felt ourselves, only with this difference, that we saw 
no trace of uneasiness in them about the matter. It was 
no little comfort to us, moreover, to find that the exceptions 
were rather among the half-men, the would-be extremely 
good, but whose goodness was of that dead and passive 
kind which spoke to but a small elevation of thought or 
activity ; while just in proportion as a man was strong, and 
real, and energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke. 
It was really most strange ; one near friend of ours — a 
man who, as far as we knew (and we knew him well), had 
never done a wrong thing — when v/e ventured to hint 
something about roguery, replied, " You see he was such a 
clever rogue, that he had a right." Another, whom we 
pressed more closely with that treacherous cannibal feast 
at Malepartus, on the body of poor Lampe, said off-hand 
and with much impatiencfe of such questioning, " Such 
fellows were made to be eaten." What could we do ? It 
had come to this ; — as in the exuberance of our pleasure 
with some dear child, no ordinary epithet will sometimes 
reach to express the vehemence of our affection, and bor- 
rowing language out of the opposites, we call him little 
rogue or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the 
analogy, we bestow the fullness of our regard on Reineke 
because of that transcendently successful roguery. 

When we asked our friends how they came to feel as 
they did, they had little to say. They were not persons 
who could be suspected of any latent disposition towards 
evil-doing ; and yet though it appeared as if they were fall- 
ing under the description of those unhappy ones who, if 



494 Reynard the Fox. 

they did not such things themselves, yet " had pleasure in 
those who did them," they did not care to justify them- 
selves. The fact was so : ap^y] ro ort : it was a fact — 
what could we want more ? Some few attempted feebly to 
maintain that the book was a satire. But this only moved 
the difficulty a single step ; for the fact of the sympathy 
remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were our- 
selves the objects of it. Others urged what we said above, 
that the story was only of poor animals that, according to 
Descartes, not only had no souls, but scarcely had even 
life in any original and sufficient sense, and therefore we 
need not trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it 
seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal 
to the proposed escape. Either there was a man hiding 
under the fox's skin ; or else, if real foxes have such brains 
as Reineke was furnished withal, no honest doubt could be 
entertained that some sort of conscience was not forgotten 
in the compounding of him, and he must be held answer- 
able according to his knowledge. 

What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with his 
might and right ? " The just thing in the long run is the 
strong thing." But Reineke had a long run out and came 
in winner. Does he only " seem to succeed ? " Who does 
succeed, then, if he no more than seems? The vulpine 
intellect knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said ; 
but among Reineke's victims we do not remember one 
goose, in the literal sense of goose ; and as to geese meta- 
phorical, the whole visible world lies down complacently at 
his feet. Nor does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on 
this very poem serve any better to help us — nay, it seems 
as if he feels uneasy in the neighborhood of so strong a 
rascal, so briefly he dismisses him. " Worldly prudence is 
the only virtue which is certain of its reward." Nay, but 
there is more in it than that • no worldly prudence would 
command the voices which have been given in to us for 
Reineke. 



Reynard the Fox, 495 

Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we 
should, on searching, find something solid in the Fox's do- 
ings to justify success ; or else the just thing was not 
always the strong thing ; or it might be, that such very 
semblance of success was itself the most miserable failure ; 
that the wicked man who was struck down and foiled, and 
foiled again, till he unlearnt his wickedness, or till he was 
disabled from any more attempting it, was blessed in his 
disappointment ; that to triumph in wickedness, and to 
continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the last, worst 
penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance. "Iv d^ai aros ?; 
aSiKos oiv — to go on with injustice through this world and 
through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, 
untaught by any untoward consequence to open his eyes 
and to see in its true accursed form the miserable demon 
to which he has sold himself — this, of all catastrophes 
which could befall an evil man, was the deepest, lowest, and 
most savoring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian 
moralists could reason out for himself, — under which 
third hypothesis many an uneasy misgiving would vanish 
away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism might be accepted 
by us with thankfulness. 

It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have to come to 
this — that if we wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, 
no Oedipus was likely to rise and find it for us ; and that 
if we wanted help, we must make it for ourselves. This 
only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for the un- 
worthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest number 
of our own sex : comforted with the sense of good fellow- 
ship, we went boldly to work upon our consciousness ; and 
the imperfect analysis which we succeeded in accomplish- 
ing, we here lay before you, whoever you may be, who 
have felt, as we have felt, a regard which was a moral dis- 
turbance to you, and which you will be pleased if we ena- 
ble you to justify — 

" Si quid novisti rectius istis, 
Candidus imperii; si non, his utere raecum." 



496 Reynard the Fox. 

Following the clew which was thrust into our hand by 
the marked difference of the feelings of men upon the sub- 
ject, from those of women, we were at once satisfied that 
Eeineke's goodness, if he had any, must lay rather in the 
active than the passive department of life. The negative 
obedience to prohibitory precepts, under which women are 
bound as well as men, as was already too clear, we were 
obliged to surrender as hopeless. But it seemed as if, with 
respect to men whose business is to do, and to labor, and 
to accomplish, this negative test was a seriously imperfect 
one ; and it was quite as possible that a man who unhap- 
pily had broken many prohibitions might yet exhibit posi- 
tive excellences, as that he might walk through life pick- 
ing his way with the utmost assiduity, risking nothing, and 
doing nothing, not committing a single sin, but keeping 
his talent carefully wrapt up in a napkin, and get sent, in 
the end, to outer darkness for his pains, as an unprofitable 
servant. And this appeared the more important to us, as 
it was very little dwelt upon by religious or moral teach- 
ers ; at the end of six thousand years, the popular notion 
of virtue, as far as it could get itself expressed, had not 
risen beyond the mere abstinence from certain specific bad 
actions. 

The king of the beasts forcrives Reineke on account of 
the substantial services which at various times he has ren- 
dered. His counsel was always the wisest, his hand the 
promptest in cases of difficulty ; and all that dexterity, and 
politeness, and courtesy, and exquisite culture had not 
been learnt without an effort, or without conquering many 
undesirable tendencies in himself. Men are not born with 
any art in its perfection, and Reineke had made himself 
valuable by his own sagacity and exertion. Now, on the 
human stage, a man who had made himself valuable is cer- 
tain to be valued. However we may pretend to estimate 
men according to the wrong things which they have done, 
or abstained from doing, we in fact follow the example of 



Reynard the Fox, 49T 

Nobel, the king of the beasts ; we give them their places 
among us according to the serviceable ness and capability 
which they display. We might mention not a few eminent 
public servants, whom the world delights to honor — min- 
isters, statesmen, lawyers, men of science, artists, poets, 
soldiers, who, if they were tried by the negative test, would 
show but a poor figure ; yet their value is too real to be 
dispensed with ; and we tolerate unquestionable wrong to 
secure the services of eminent ability. The world really 
does this, and it always has really done it from the begin- 
ning of the human history; and it is only indolence or 
cowardice which has left our ethical teaching halting so 
far behind the universal and necessary practice. Even 
questionable prima donnas, in virtue of their sweet voices, 
have their praises hymned in drawing-room and newspaper ; 
and applause rolls over them, and gold and bouquets 
shower on them from lips and hands which, except for 
those said voices, would treat them to a ruder reward. In 
real fact, we take our places in this world, not according to 
what we are not, but according to what we are. His Holi- 
ness Pope Clement, when his audience-room rang with 
furious outcries for justice on Benvenuto Cellini, who, as 
far as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as fair a 
candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that unlucky 
wood, replied, " All this is very well, gentlemen ; these 
murders are bad things ; we know that. But where am I 
to get another Benvenuto if you hang this one for me ? " 

Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old Greek 
sort, the theme of the song of the greatest of human poets, 
whom it is less easy to refuse to admire than even our 
friend Reineke. Take Ulysses. It cannot be said that he 
kept his hands from taking what was not his, or his tongue 
from speaking what was not true ; and if Frau Ermelyn 
had to complain (as indeed there was too much reason for 
her complaining) of certain infirmities in her good husband 
Reineke, Penelope, too, might have urged a thing or two 



498 Reynard tJie Fox, 

if she had known as much about the matter as we know, 
which the modern moralist would find it hard to excuse. 

After all is said, the capable man is the man to be ad- 
mired. The man who tries and fails, what is the use of 
him ? We are in this world to do something — not to fail 
in doing it. Of your bunglers — helpless, inefficient per- 
sons, " unfit alike for good or ill," who try one thing, and 
fail because they are not strong enough ; and another, be- 
cause they have not energy enough ; and a third, because 
they have no talent — inconsistent, unstable, and therefore 
never to excel, what shall we say of them ? what use is 
there in them ? what hope is there of them ? what can 
we wish for them ? ro fxi^-n-or eTvat TvavT apicrrov. It 
were better for them they had never been born. To be 
able to do what a man tries to do, that is the first requi- 
site ; and given that, we may hope all things . for him. 
" Hell is paved with good intentions," the proverb says ; 
and the enormous proportion of bad successes in this life 
lie between the desire and the execution. Give us a man 
who is able to do what he settles that he desires to do, and 
we have the one thing indispensable. If he can succeed 
doing ill, much more he can succeed doing well. Show 
him better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he will 
do better. 

We are not concerned here with Benvenuto or with 
Ulysses further than to show, through the position which 
we all consent to give them, that there is much unreality 
in our common moral talk, against which we must be on 
our guard. And if we fling off an old friend, and take to 
aflfecting a hatred of him which we do not feel, we have 
scarcely gained by the exchange, even though originally 
our friendship may have been misplaced. 

Capability no one will deny to Reineke. That is the 
very differentia of him. An " animal capable " would be 
his sufficient definition. Here is another very genuinely 
valuable feature about him — his wonderful singleness of 



Reynard the Fox. 499 

character. Lying, treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he 
is, there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. 
Cheating all the world, he never cheats himself; and while 
he is a hypocrite, he is always a conscious hypocrite — a 
form of character, however paradoxical it may seem, a 
great deal more accessible to good influences than the 
other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the prin- 
ciples of his life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he 
could do so with the greatest exactness. There would be 
no discrepancy between the profession and the practice. 
He is most truly single-minded, and therefore stable in his 
ways, and therefore, as the world goes, and in the world's 
sense, successful. Whether really successful is a question 
we do not care here to enter on ; but only to say this — 
that of all unsuccessful men in every sense, either divine, 
or human, or devilish, there is none equal to Bunyan's Mr. 
Facing-both-ways — the fellow with one eye on heaven 
and one on earth — who sincerely preaches one thing, and 
sincerely does another ; and from the intensity of his un- 
reality is unable either to see or feel the contradiction. 
Serving God with his lips, and with the half of his mind 
which is not bound up in the world, and serving the devil 
with his actions, and with the other half, he is substantially 
trying to cheat both God and the devil, and is, in fact, only 
cheating himself and his neighbors. This, of all characters 
upon the earth, appears to us to be the one of whom there 
is no hope at all — a character becoming, in these days, 
alarmingly abundant ; and the abundance of which makes 
us find even in a Reineke an inexpressible relief. 

But what we most thoroughly value in him is his ca- 
pacity. He can do what he sets to work to do. That 
blind instinct with which the world shouts and claps its 
hand for the successful man. is one of those latent im- 
pulses in us which are truer than we know ; it is the uni- 
versal confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in her 
intolerance of disguise and hypocrisy, compels us to be our 



500 Reynard the Fox, 

own accusers. Whoever can succeed in a given condition 
of society, can succeed only in virtue of fulfilling the terms 
which society exacts of him ; and if he can fulfill them tri- 
umphantly, of course it rewards him and praises him. He 
is what the rest of the world would be if their powers 
were equal to their desires. He has accomplished what 
they all are vaguely, and with imperfect consistency, strug- 
gling to accomplish ; and the character of the conqueror 
— the means and aiDpliances by which he has climbed up 
that great pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the ob- 
served of all observers, is no more than a very exact indi- 
cator of the amount of real virtue in the age, out of which 
he stands prominent. 

We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very 
virtuous age in which Reineke made himself a great man ; 
but that was the fault of the age as much as the fault of him. 
His nature is to succeed wherever he is. If the age had 
required something else of him, then he would have been 
something else. Whatever it had said to him, " Do, and I 
will make you my hero," that Reineke would have done. 
No appetite makes a slave of him — no faculty refuses 
obedience to his will. His entire nature is under perfect 
organic control to the one supreme authority. And the 
one object for which he lives, and for which, let his lot 
have been cast in whatever century it might, he would 
always have lived, is to rise, to thrive, to prosper, and 
become great. 

The world as he found it said unto him, — Prey upon 
us ; we are your oyster, let your wit open us. If you will 
only do it cleverly — if you will take care that we shall 
not close upon your fingers in the process, you may devour 
us at your pleasure, and we shall feel ourselves highly 
honored. Can we wonder at a fox of Reineke's abilities 
taking such a world at its word ? 

And let it not be supposed that society in this earth of 
ours is ever so viciously put together, is ever so totally 



Reynard the Fox. 501 

without organic life, that a rogue, unredeemed by any 
merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength in rotten- 
ness ; and when it comes to that, society dies and falls in 
pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly success, is 
impossible, without some exercise of what is called moral 
virtue, without some portion of it, infinitesimally small, 
perhaps, but still some. Courage, for instance, steady self- 
confidence, self trust, self-reliance — that only basis and 
foundation stone on which a strong character can rear 
itself — do we not see this in Reineke ? While he lives, 
he lives for himself; but if he comes to dying, he can die 
like his betters : and his wit is not of that effervescent 
sort which will fly away at the sight of death and leave 
him panic-stricken. It is true there is a meaning ^to that 
word courage, which was perhaps not to be found in the 
dictionary in which Reineke studied. " I hope I am afraid 
of nothing, Tini;" said my Uncle Toby, " except doing a 
wrong thing." With Reineke there was no "except." 
His digestive powers shrank from no action, good or bad, 
which would serve his turn. Yet it required no slight 
measure of courage to treat his fellow- creatures with the 
steady disrespect with which Reineke treats them. To 
walk along among them, regardless of any interest but his 
own ; out of mere wantonness to hook them up like so 
many cockchafers, and spin them for his pleasure; not 
like Domitian, with an imperial army to hold them down 
during the operation, but with no other assistance but his 
own little body and large wit ; it was something to ven- 
ture upon. And a world which would submit to be so 
treated, what could he do but despise ? 

To the animals utterly below ourselves, external to our 
own species, we hold ourselves bound by no law. We say 
to them, vos non vohis, without any uneasy misgivings. We 
rob the bees of their honey, the cattle of their lives, the 
horse and the ass of their liberty. We kill the wild 
animals that they may not interfere with our pleasures ; 



502 Reynard the Fox. 

and acknowledge ourselves bound to them by no terras 
except what are dictated by our own convenience. And 
why should Reineke have acknowledged an obligation any 
more than we, to creatures so utterly below himself? He 
was so clever, as our friend said, that he had a right. 
That he could treat them so, Mr. Carlyle would say, proves 
that he had a right. 

But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience. 
No bold creature is ever totally without one. Even lago 
shows some sort of conscience. Respecting nothing else 
in heaven or earth, he respects and even reverences his 
own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews with 
Roderigo, his, what we must call conscience, takes him to 
account for his company ; and he pleads to it in his own 
justification, — 

"For I mine own gained knowledge should ^ro/a«e 
"Were I to waste myself with such a snipe 
But for my sport and profit." 

Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds, preyed 
chiefly, like our own Robin Hood, on rogues who were 
greater rogues than himself. If Bruin chose to steal 
Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the priest's 
granary, they were but taken in their own evil-doings. 
And what is Isegrim, the worst of Reineke's victims, but 
a great heavy, stupid, lawless brute ? — fair type, we will 
suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs and other so-called 
nobles of the poet's era, whose will to do mischief was 
happily limited by their obtuseness. We remember that 
French baron — Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was his 
name — who, like Isegrim, had studied at the universities, 
and passed for learned, whose after-dinner pastime for 
many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's 
throats for the pleasure of watching them die. We may 
well feel gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be the 
scourge of such monsters as these ; and we have a 
thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing the intel- 



Reynard the Fox, 503 

lect in that little weak body triumph over them and tram- 
ple them down. This, indeed, this victory of intellect 
over brute force, is one great secret of our pleasure in the 
poem, and goes far, in the Carlyle direction, to satisfy us, 
that, at any rate, it is not given to mere base physical 
strength to win in the battle of life, even in times when 
physical strength is apparently the only recognized power. 

We are insensibly falling from our self-assumed judicial 
office into that of advocacy ; and sliding into what may 
be plausibly urged, rather than standing fast on what we 
can surely affirm. Yet there are cases when it is fitting 
for the judge to become the advocate of an undefended 
prisoner ; and advocacy is only plausible when a few words 
of truth are mixed with what we say, like the few drops 
of wine which color and faintly flavor the large draught 
of water. Such few grains or drops, whatever they may 
be, we must leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends to 
distill for him, while we continue a little longer in the same 
strain. 

After all, it may be said, what is it in man's nature 
which is really admirable ? It is idle for us to waste our 
labor in passing Reineke through the moral crucible unless 
we shall recognize the results when we obtain them ; and 
in these moral sciences our analytical tests can only be 
obtained by a study of our own internal experience. If 
we desire to know what we admire in Reineke, we must 
look for what we admire in ourselves. And what is that ? 
Is it what on Sundays, and on set occasions, and when we 
are mounted on our moral stilts, we are pleased to call 
goodness, probity, obedience, humility? Is it? Is it 
really ? Is it not rather the face and form which Nature 
made — the strength which is ours, we know not how — 
our talents, our rank, our possessions ? It appears to us 
that we most value in ourselves and most admire in our 
neighbor, not acquisitions, but gifts. A man does not 
praise himself for being good. If he praise himself be is 



504 Reynard the Fox, 

not good. The first condition of goodness is forgetfulness 
of self ; and where self has entered, under however plausi- 
ble a form, the health is but skin-deep, and underneath 
there is corruption. And so through every thing: we 
value, we are vain of, proud of, or whatever you please to 
call it, not what we have done for ourselves, but what has 
been done for us — what has been given to us by the 
upper powers. We look up to high-born men, to wealthy 
men, to fortunate men, to clever men. Is it not so? 
Whom do we choose for the county member, the magis- 
trate, the officer, the minister ? The good man we leave 
to the humble enjoyment of his goodness, and we look out 
for the able or the wealthy. And again of the wealthy, 
as if on every side to witness to the same universal law, 
the man who with no labor of his own has inherited a for- 
tune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his father 
who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as 
have the longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest 
removed from the first who made the fortune and founded 
the family, we are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain, 
the fouler the stream ; and that first ancestor, who has 
soiled his fingers by labor, is no better than a parvenu. 

And as it is with what we value, so it is with what we 
blame. It is an old story, that there is no one who would 
not in his heart prefer being a knave to being a fool ; and 
when we fail in a piece of attempted roguery, as Coleridge 
has wisely observed, though reasoning unwisely from it, we 
lay the blame, not on our own moral nature, for which we 
are responsible, but on our intellectual, for which we are 
not responsible. We do not say what knaves, we say what 
fools, we have been ; perplexing Coleridge, who regards it 
as a phenomenon of some deep moral disorder ; whereas 
it is but one more evidence of the universal fact that gifts 
are the true and proper object of appreciation ; and as we 
admire men for possessing gifts, so we blame them for their 
absence. The noble man is the gifted man ; the ignoble 



Tteynard the Fox. 505 

is the ungifled ; and therefore we have only to state a 
simple law in simple language to have a full solution of 
the enigma of Reineke. He has gifts enough : of that, at 
least, there can be no doubt ; and if he lacks the gift to use 
them in the way which we call good, at least he uses them 
successfully. His victims are less gifted than he, and 
therefore less noble ; and therefore he has a right to use 
them as he pleases. 

And, after ,all, what are these victims ? Among the 
heaviest charges which were urged against him was the 
killing and eating of that wretched Scharfenebbe — Sharp- 
beak — the crow's wife. It is well that there are two sides 
to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not to be 
allowed to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but what an 
unclean carrion bird must come down and take a peck at 
him. We can feel no sympathy with the outcries of the 
crow husband over the fate of the unfortunate Sharpbeak. 
Wofully, he says, he flew over the place where, a few mo- 
ments before, in the glory of glossy plumage, a loving 
wife sat croaking out her passion for him, and found 
nothing — nothing but a little blood and a few torn feath- 
ers — all else clean gone and utterly abolished. Well, 
and if it was so, it was a blank prospect for him, but the 
earth was well rid of her ; and for herself, it was a higher 
fate to be assimilated into the body of Reineke than to re- 
main in a miserable individuality to be a layer of carrion 
crows' eggs. 

And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze, and 
the rest, who would needs be meddling \y\i\\ what was no 
concern of theirs — what is there in them to challenge 
either regret or pity ? They made love to their occupation. 

" 'T is dangerous when the baser nature falls 
Between the pass and fell incensed points 
Of mighty opposite? : 
They lie not near our conscience." 

Ah ! if they were all. But there is one misdeed, one 



506 Reynard the Fox, 

which outweighs all others whatsoever — a crime which it 
is useless to palliate, let our other friend say what he 
pleased ; and Reineke himself felt it so. It sat heavy, 
for him, on his soul, and alone of- all the actions of his life 
we are certain that he wished it undone — the death and 
eating of that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a 
paltry revenge in Reineke. Lampe had told tales of him ; 
he had complained that Reineke, under pretense of teach- 
ing him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to mur- 
der him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting 
himself, after such a warning, into the jaws of Malepartus, 
Reineke betrays an uneasiness about it in confession ; and, 
unlike himself, feels it necessary to make some sort of an 
excuse. 

Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had 
been obliged to speak severely of the seriousness of the 
offense. " You see," Reineke answers, — 

" To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of business: one can- 
not 
Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the cloister. 
When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our fingers. 
Lampe sorely provoked me ; he frisked about this way and that way, 
Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so jolly, 
Eeally I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved him. 
And then he was so stupid." 

But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy Reineke. 
His mind is evidently softened, and it was on that occasion 
that he poured out his pathetic lamentation over the sad 
condition of the world — so fluent, so musical, so touching, 
that Grimbart listened with wide eyes, unable, till it had 
run to the length of a sermon, to collect himself. It is 
true that at last his office as ghostly father obliged him to 
put in a slight demurrer : — 

" Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your neighbors ; 
Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now to the purpose." 

But he sighs to think what a bishop Reineke would have 
made. 



Reynard the Fox, 607 

And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs, 
and to the song in which his glory is enshrined — the Welt 
Bibel, Bible of this world, as Goethe called it, the most ex- 
quisite moral satire, as we will call it, which has ever been 
composed. It is not addressed to a passing mode of folly 
or of profligacy, but it touches the perennial nature of 
mankind, laying bare our own sympathies, and tastes, and 
weaknesses, with as keen and true an edge as when the 
living world of the old Swabian poet winced under its ear- 
liest utterance. 

Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which it 
gives may have its echo in a sigh, or niay glide into it as ex- 
citement subsides into thought ; and yet, for those who do 
not care to find matter there either for thought or sadness, 
may remain innocently as, a laugh. 

Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for the 
bitterness of irony, the poem is, as the world itself, a book 
where each man will find what his nature enables him to 
see, which gives us back each our own image, and teaches 
us each the lesson which each of us desires to learn. 



THE CAT'S PILGEIMAGE. 

1850. 

PART I. 

" It is all very fine," said the Cat, yawning, and stretch- 
ing herself against the fender, " but it is rather a bore ; I 
don't see the use of it." She raised herself, and arranging 
her tail into a ring, and seating herself in the middle of it, 
with her fore-paws in a straight line from her shoulders, at 
right angles to the hearth-rug, she looked pensively at the 
fire. " It is very odd," she went on : " there is my poor 
Tom ; he is gone. I saw him stretched out in the yard. I 
spoke to him, and he took no notice of me. He won't, I 
suppose, ever any more, for they put him under the earth. 
Nice fellow he was. It is wonderful how little one cares 
about it. So many jolly evenings we spent together; and 
now I seem to get on quite as well without him. I wonder 
what has become of him ; and my last children, too, what 
has become of them ? What are we here for ? I would 
ask the men, only they are so conceited and stupid they 
can't understand what we say. I hear them droning away, 
teaching their little ones every day ; telling them to be 
good, and to do what they are bid, and all that. Nobody 
ever tells me to do any thing ; if they do I don't do it, and I 
am very good. I wonder whether I should be any better 
if I minded more. I '11 ask the Dog. 

" Dog," said she, to a little fat spaniel coiled up on a mat, 



The Cat's Pilgrimage. 509 

like a lady's inufF with a head and tail stuck on to it, " Dog, 
what do you make of it all ? " 

The Dog faintly opened his languid eyes, looked sleepily 
at the Cat for a moment, and dropped them again. 

" Dog," she said, " I want to talk to you ; don't go to 
sleep. Can't you answer a civil question ? " 

" Don't bother me," said the Dog, " I am tired. I stood 
on my hind-legs ten minutes this morning before I could 
get my breakfast, and it has n't agreed with me." 

" Who told you to do it ? " said the Cat. 

" Why, the lady I have to take care of me," replied the 
Dog. 

" Do you feel any better for it. Dog, after you have been 
standing on your legs ? " asked she. 

'^ Hav'n't I told you, you stupid Cat, that it has n't agreed 
with me ; let me go to sleep and don't plague me." 

" But I mean," persisted the Cat, " do you feel improved, 
as the men call it ? They tell their children that if they 
do what they are told they will improve, and grow good and 
great. Do you feel good and great ? " 

" What do I know ? " said the Dog. " I eat my break- 
fast and am happy. Let me alone." 

" Do you never think, Dog without a soul ! Do you 
never wonder what dogs are, and what this world is ? " 

The Dog stretched himself, and rolled his eyes lazily 
round the room. " I conceive," he said, " that the world 
is for dogs, and men and women are put into it to take care 
of dogs ; women to take care of little dogs like me, and men 
for the big dogs like those in the yard — and cats," he con- 
tinued, " are to know their place, and not to be trouble- 
some." 

" They beat you sometimes," said the Cat. " Why do 
they do that ? They never beat me." 

" If they forget their places, and beat me,^' snarled the 
Dog, " I bite them, and they don't do it again. I should 
like to bite you, too, you nasty Cat ; you have woke me 
up." 



510 The Cat's Pilgrimage. 

"There may be truth in what you say," said the Cat, 
calmly ; " but I think your view is limited. If you listened 
like me you would hear the men say it was all made for 
them, and you and I were made to amuse them." 

" They don't dare to say so," said the Dog. 

" They do, indeed," said the Cat. " I hear many things 
which you lose by sleeping so much. They think I am 
asleep, and so they are not afraid to talk before me ; but 
my ears are open when my eyes are shut." 

" You surprise me," said the Dog. " I never listen to 
them, except when I take notice of them, and then they 
never talk of any thing except of me." 

" I could tell you a thing or two about yourself which 
you don't know," said the Cat. " You have never heard, I 
dare say, that once upon a time your fathers lived in a 
temple, and that people prayed to them." 

" Prayed ! what is that ? " 

" Why, they went on their knees to you to ask you to 
give them good things, just as you stand on your toes to 
them now to ask for your breakfast. You don't know either 
that you have got one of those bright things we see up in 
the air at night called after you." 

" "Well, it is just what I said," answered the Dog. '• I 
told you it was all made for us. They never did any thing 
of that sort for you ? " 

" Did n't they ? Wliy, there was a whole city where the 
people did nothing else, and as soon as we got stiff and 
could n't move about any more, instead of being put under 
the ground like poor Tom, we used to be stuffed full of all 
sorts of nice things, and kept better than we were when we 
were alive." 

" You are a very wise Cat," answered her companion ; 
" but what good is it knowing all this ? " 

" Wliy, don't you see," said she, " they don't do it any 
more. We are going down in the world, we are, and that 
is why living on in this way is such an unsatisfactory 



The Cafs Pilgrimage. 511 

sort of thing. I don't mean to complain for myself, and 
you need n't, Dog : we have a quiet life of it ; but a quiet 
life is not the thing, and if there is nothing to be done ex- 
cept sleep and eat, and eat and sleep, why, as I said before, 
I don't see the use of it. There is something more in it 
than that ; there was once, and there will be again, and 1 
sha'n't be happy till I find it out. It is a shame. Dog, I 
say. The men have been here only a few thousand years, 
and we — why, we have been here hundreds of thousands ; 
if we are older, we ought to be wiser, I '11 go and ask the 
creatures in the woods." 

" You '11 learn more from the men," said the Dog. 

" They are stupid, and they don't know what I say to 
them ; besides, they are so conceited they care for nothing 
except themselves. No, I shall try what I can do in the 
woods. I 'd as soon go after poor Tom as stay living any 
longer like this." 

" And where is poor Tom ? " yawned the Dog. 

" That is just one of the things I want to know," an- 
swered she. " Poor Tom is lying under the yard, or the 
skin of him, but whether that is the whole I don't feel so 
sure. They did n't think so in the city I told you about. 
It is a beautiful day, Dog ; you won't take a trot out with 
me ? " she added, wistfully. 

« Who — I ? " said the Dog. " Not quite." 

" You may get so wise," said she. 

" Wisdom is good," said the Dog ; " but so is the hearth- 
rug, thank you ! " 

" But you may be free," said she. 

" I shall have to hunt for my own dinner," said he. 

" But, Dog, they may pray to you again," said she. 

" But I sha'n't have a softer mat to sleep upon. Cat, and 
as I am rather delicate, that is a consideration." 



612 The Oafs Pilgrimage, 



PART II. 

So the Dog would n't go, and the Cat set off by herself 
to learn how to be happy, and to be all that a Cat could be. 
It was a fine sunny morning. She determined to try the 
meadow first, and, after an hour or two, if she had not suc- 
ceeded, then to go off to the wood. A Blackbird was piping 
away on a thornbush as if his heart was running over with 
happiness. The Cat had breakfasted, and so was able to lis- 
ten without any mixture of feeling. She did n't sneak. She 
walked boldly up under the bush, and the bird, seeing she 
had no bad purpose, sat still and sung on. 

" Good morning. Blackbird ; you seem to be enjoying 
yourself this fine day." 

" Good niorning. Cat." 

" Blackbird, it is an odd question, perhaps, — What 
ought one to do to be as happy as you ? " 

" Do your duty. Cat." 

" But what is my duty, Blackbird ? " 

" Take care of your little ones. Cat." 

" I hav'n't any," said she. 

" Then sing to your mate," said the bird. 

" Tom is dead," said she. 

" Poor Cat ! " said the bird. " Then sing over his grave. 
If your song is sad, you will find your heart grow lighter 
for it." 

" Mercy ! " thought the Cat. " I could do a little sing- 
ing with a living lover, but I never heard of singing for a 
dead one. But you see, bird, it is n't Cats' nature. When 
I am cross, I mew. When I am pleased, I purr ; but I 
must be pleased first. I can't purr myself into happiness." 

" I am afraid there is something the matter with your 
heart, my Cat. It wants warming ; good-by." 

The Blackbird flew away. The Cat looked sadly afler 
him. " He thinks I am like him ; and he does n't know 



The Cat's Pilgrimage. 513 

that a Cat is a Cat," said she. " As it happens now, I feel 
a great deal for a Cat. If I had n't got a heart I should n't 
be imha^Dpy. I won't be angry. " I '11 try that great fat 
fellow." 

The Ox lay placidly chewing, with content beaming out 
of his eyes and playing on his mouth. 

" Ox," she said, " what is the way to be happy ? " 

" Do your duty," said the Ox. 

" Bother," said the Cat ; " duty again ! What is it, 
Ox?" 

" Get your dinner," said the Ox. 

" But it is got for me, Ox ; and I have nothing to do but 
to eat it." 

" Well, eat it, then, like me." 

" So I do ; but I am not happy for all that." 

" Then you are a very wicked, ungrateful Cat." 

The Ox munched away. A Bee buzzed into a buttercup 
under the Cat's nose. 

" I beg your pardon," said the Cat ; " it is n't curiosity — 
what are you doing ? " 

" Doing my duty ; don't stop me, Cat." 

" But, Bee, what is your duty ? " 

" Making honey," said the Bee. 

" I wish I could make honey," sighed the Cat. 

" Do you mean to say you can't ? " said the Bee. " How 
stupid you must be. What do you do, then ? " 

" I do nothing, Bee. I can't get any thing to do." 

" You won't get any thing to do, you mean, you lazy Cat ! 
You are a good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we 
do to our drones ? We kill them ; and that is all they are 
fit for. Good morning to you." 

" Well, I am sure," said the Cat, " they are treating me 
civilly ; I had better have stopped at home at this rate. 
Stroke my whiskers ! Heartless ! wicked ! good-for-noth- 
ing ! stupid ! and only fit to be killed ! This is a pleasant 
beginning, anyhow. I must look for some wiser creatures 
33 



514 The Oafs Pilgrimage. 

than these are. What shall I do ? I know. I know where 
I will go." 

It was in the middle of the wood. The bush was very 
dark, but she found him by his wonderful eye. Presently, 
as she got used to the light, she distinguished a sloping roll 
of feathers, a rounded breast, surmounted by a round head, 
set close to the body, without an inch of a neck intervening. 
" How wise he looks ! " she said ; " what a brain ! what a 
forehead ! His head is not long, but what an expanse ! and 
what a depth of earnestness ! The Owl sloped his head a 
little on one side ; the Cat slanted hers upon the other. 
The Owl set it straight again, the Cat did the same. They 
stood looking in this way for some minutes ; at last, in a 
whispering voice, the Owl said, " What are you who pre- 
sume to look into my repose ? Pass on upon your way, 
and carry elsewhere those prying eyes." 

" wonderful Owl," said the Cat, " you are wise, and I 
want to be wise ; and I am come to you to teach me/' 

A film floated backwards and forwards over the Owl's 
eyes ; it was his way of showing that he was pleased. 

" I have heard in our school-room," went on the Cat, 
" that you sat on the shoulder of Pallas, and she toid you 
all about it." 

" And what would you know, my daughter ? " said the 
Owl. 

" Every thing," said the Cat, " every thing. First of all, 
how to be happy." 

" Mice content you not, my child, even as they content 
not me," said the Owl. " It is good." 

" Mice, indeed ! " said the Cat ; " no. Parlor Cats don't 
eat mice. I have better than mice, and no trouble to get 
it ; but I want something more." 

" The body's meat is provided. You would now fill 
your soul." 

" I want to improve," said the Cat. " I want something 
to do. I want to find out what the creatures call my 
duty." 



The Cafs Pilgrimage, 515 

" You would learn how to employ those happy hours of 
your leisure — rather how to make them happy by a wor- 
thy use. Meditate, Cat ! meditate ! meditate ! " 

" That is the very thing," said she. " Meditate ! that is 
what I like above all things. Only I want to know how ; 
I want something to meditate about. Tell me, Owl, and I 
will bless you every hour of the day as I sit by the parlor 
fire." 

" I will tell you," answered the Owl, " what I have been 
thinking of ever since the moon changed. You shall take 
it home with you and think about it too ; and the next full 
moon you shall come again to me ; we will compare our 
conclusions." 

" Delightful ! delightful ! " said the Cat. " What is it ? 
I will try this minute." 

" From the beginning," replied the Owl, " our race have 
been considering which first existed, the Owl or the egg. 
The Owl comes from the egg, but likewise the egg from 
the Owl." 

" Mercy ! " said the Cat. 

" From sunrise to sunset I ponder on it, Cat I When 
I reflect on the beauty of the complete Owl, I think that 
must have been first, as the cause is greater than the 
effect. When I remember my own childhood, I incline 
the other way." 

" Well, but how are we to find out ? " said the Cat. 

" Find out ! " said the Owl. " We can never find out. 
The beauty of the question is, that its solution is impossi- 
ble. What would become of all our delightful reasonings, 
O unwise Cat ! if we were so unhappy as to know ? " 

" But what in the world is the good of thinking about it, 
if you can't, Owl ? " 

" My child, that is a foolish question. It is good, in or- 
der that the thoughts on these things may stimulate won- 
der. It is in wonder that the Owl is great." 

" Then you don't know any thing at all," said the Cat. 



516 The Cafs Pilgrimage. 

" What did you sit on Pallas's skoulder for ? You must 
have gone to sleep." 

" Your tone is over-flippant, Cat, for philosophy. The 
highest of all knowledge is to know that we know 
nothing." 

The Cat made two great arches with her back and her 
tail. 

" Bless the mother that laid you," said she. " You were 
dropped by mistake in a goose-nest. You won't do. I 
don't know much, but I am not such a creature as you, any- 
how. A great white thing ! " 

She straightened her body, stuck her tail up on end, and 
marched off with much dignity. But, though she respected 
herself rather more than before, she was not on the way to 
the end of her difficulties. She tried all the creatures she 
met without advancing a step. They had all the old story, 
" Do your duty." But each had its own, and no one could 
tell her what hers was. Only one point they all agreed 
upon — the duty of getting their dinner when they were 
hungry. The day wore on, and she began to think she 
would like hers. Her meals came so regularly at home 
that she scarcely knew what hunger was ; but now the 
sensation came over her very palpably, and she experi- 
enced quite new emotions as the hares and rabbits skipped 
about her, or as she spied a bird upon a tree. For a mo- 
ment she thought she would go back and eat the Owl — 
he was the most useless creature she had seen ; but on 
second thought she did n't fancy he would be nice : besides 
that, his claws were sharp and his beak too. Presently, 
however, as she sauntered down the path, she came on a 
little open patch of green, in the middle of which a fine 
fat Rabbit was sitting. There was no escape. The path 
ended there, and the bushes were so thick on each side 
that he could n't get away except through her paws. 

" Really," said the Cat. " I don't wish to be troublesome ; 
I would n't do it if I could help it ; but I am very hungry, 



The Oat's Pilgrimage. 517 

I am afraid I must eat you. It is very unpleasant, I as- 
sure you, to me as well as to you." 

The poor Rabbit begged for mercy. 

" Well, " said she, " I think it is hard ; I do really — 
and, if the law could be altered, I should be the first to 
welcome it. But what can a Cat do ? You eat the grass ; 
I eat you. But, Rabbit, I wish you would do me a 
favor." 

" Any thing to save my life," said the Rabbit. 

" It is not exactly that," said the Cat ; " but I have n't 
been used to killing my own dinner, and it is disagreeable. 
Could n't you die ? I shall hurt you dreadfully if I kill 
you." 

" Oh ! " said the Rabbit, " you are a kind Cat ; I see it 
in your eyes, and your whiskers don't curl like those of the 
cats in the woods. I am sure you will spare me." 

" But, Rabbit, it is a question of principle. I have to do 
my duty ; and the only duty I have, as far as I can make 
out, is to get my dinner." 

" If you kill me. Cat, to do your duty, I sha'n't be able 
to do mine." 

It was a doubtful point, and the Cat was new to casu- 
istry. " What is your duty ? " said she. 

" I have seven little ones at home — seven little ones, 
and they will all die without me. Pray let me go." 

"What! do you take care of your children?" said the 
Cat. " How interesting ! I should like to see that ; take 
me." 

" Oh ! you would eat them, you would," said the Rabbit. 
" No ! better eat me than them. No, no." 

" Well, well," said the Cat, " I don't know ; I suppose I 
could n't answer for myself. I don't think I am right, for 
duty is pleasant, and it is very unpleasant to be so hungry ; 
but I suppose you must go. You seem a good Rabbit. 
Are you happy, Rabbit ? " 

" Happy ! O dear beautiful Cat ! if you spare me to my 
poor babies ! " 



518 The Cat's Pilgrimage, 

" Pooh, jDooh ! " said the Cat, peevishly ; " I don't want 
fine speeches ; I meant whether you thought it worth 
while to be alive ! Of course you do I It don't matter. 
Go, and keep out of my way ; for, if I don't get my 
dinner, you may not get off another time. Get along, 
Rabbit." 



PART III. 

It was a great day in the Fox's cave. The eldest cub 
had the night before brought home his first goose, and 
they were just sitting down to it as the Cat came by. 

"Ah, my young lady! what, you in the woods? Bad 
feeding at home, eh ? Come out to hunt for yourself?" 

The goose smelt excellent; the Cat couldn't help a 
wistful look. She was only come, she said, to pay her 
respects to her wild friends. 

" Just in time," said the Fox. " Sit down and take a 
bit of dinner ; I see you want it. Make room, you cubs ; 
place a seat for the lady." 

" Why, thank you," said the Cat, " yes ; I acknowledge 
it is not unwelcome. Pray, don't disturb yourselves, young 
Foxes. I am hungry. I met a Rabbit on my way here. 
I was going to eat him, but he talked so prettily I let 
him go." 

The cubs looked up from their plates, and burst out 
laughing. 

" For shame, young rascals ! " said their father. " Where 
are your manners ? Mind your dinner, and don't be 
rude." 

" Fox," she said, when it was over, and the cubs were 
gone to play, " you are very clever. The other creatures 
are all stupid." The Fox bowed. "Your family were 
always clever," she continued. " I have heard about them 



The Cat's Pilgrimage. 519 

in the books they use in our school-room. It is many- 
years since your ancestor stole the crow's dinner." 

" Don't say stole, Cat ; it is not pretty. Obtained by 
superior ability." 

" I beg your pardon,'' said the Cat ; " it is all living with 
those men. That is not the point. Well, but I want to 
know whether you are any wiser or any better than Foxes 
were then ? " 

" Really," said the Fox, " I am what Nature made me. 
I don't know. I am proud of my ancestors, and do my 
best to keep up the credit of the family." 

" Well, but Fox, I mean do you improve ? do I ? do any 
of you ? The men are always talking about doing their 
duty, and that, they say, is the way to improve, and to be 
happy. And as I was not happy, I thought that had, 
perhaps, something to do with it, so I came out to talk to 
the creatures. They also had the old chant — duty, duty, 
duty ; but none of them could tell me what mine was, or 
whether I had any." 

The Fox smiled. "Another leaf out of your school- 
room," said he. " Can't they tell you there ? " 

" Indeed," she said, " they are very absurd. They say 
a great deal about themselves, but they only speak disre- 
spectfully of us. If such creatures as they can do their 
duty, and improve, and be happy, why can't we ? " 

" They say they do, do they ? " said the Fox. " What 
do they say of me ? " 

The Cat hesitated. 

" Don't be afraid of hurting my feelings. Cat. Out with 
it." 

" They do all justice to your abilities, Fox," said she ; 
" but your morality, they say, is not high. They say you 
are a rogue." 

" Morality ! " said the Fox. " Very moral and good they 
are. And you really believe all that ? What do they mean 
by calling me a rogue ? " 



520 The Cat's Pilgrimage. 

"They mean you take whatever you can get, without 
caring whether it is just or not." 

" My dear Cat, it is very well for a man, if he can't 
bear his own face, to paint a pretty one on a panel and 
call it a looking-glass ; but you don't mean that it takes 
you in ? " 

" Teach me," said the cat. '• I fear I am weak." 

"Who get justice from the men unless they can force it? 
Ask the sheep that are cut into mutton. Ask the horses 
that draw their ploughs. I don't mean it Is wrong of the 
men to do as they do ; but they need n't lie about it." 

" You surprise me," said the Cat. 

" My good Cat, there is but one law in the world. The 
weakest goes to the wall. The men are sharj^er-witted 
than the creatures, and so they get the better of them and 
use them. They may call it just if they like ; but when a 
tiger eats a man, I guess he has just as much justice on 
his side as the man when he eats a sheep." 

" And that is the whole of it," said the Cat. " Well, it is 
very sad. What do you do with yourself? " 

" My duty, to be sure," said the Fox ; " use my wits and 
enjoy myself My dear friend, you and I are on the lucky 
side. We eat and are not eaten." 

" Except by the hounds now and then," said the Cat. 

" Yes ; by brutes that forget their nature, and sell their 
freedom to the men," said the Fox, bitterly. "In the 
mean time my wits have kept my skin whole hitherto, and 
I bless Nature for making me a Fox and not a goose." 

" And are you happy, Fox ? " 

" Happy ! yes, of course. So would you be if you 
would do like me, and use your wits. My good Cat, I 
should be as miserable as you if I found my geese every 
day at the cave's mouth. I have to hunt for them, lie for 
them, sneak for them, fight for them ; cheat those old fat 
farmers, and bring out what there is inside me ; and then 
I am happy — of course I am. And then. Cat, think of 



The Cat's Pilgrimage. 521 

my feelings as a father last night, when my dear boy came 
home with the very young gosling which was marked for 
the Michaelmas dinner ! Old Reineke himself was n't 
more than a match for that young Fox at his years. You 
know our epic ? " 

" A little of it, Fox. They don't read it in our school- 
room. They say it is not moral ; but I have heard pieces 
of it. I hope it is not all quite true." 

" Pack of stuff ! it is the only true book that ever was 
written. If it is not, it ought to be. Why, that book is 
the law of the world — la carriere aux talents — and writ- 
ing it was the honestest thing ever done by a man. That 
fellow knew a thing or two, and was n't ashamed of himself 
when he did know. They are all like him, too, if they 
would only say so. There never was one of them yet 
who was n't more ashamed of being called ugly than of 
being called a rogue, and of being called stupid than of 
being called naughty." 

" It has a roguish end, this life of yours, 'f you keep 
clear of the hounds. Fox," said the Cat. 

" What ! a rope in the yard ! Well, it must end some 
day ; and when the farmer catches me I shall be getting 
old, and my brains will be taking leave of me ; so the 
sooner I go the better, that I may disgrace myself the less. 
Better be jolly while it lasts, than sit mewing out your life 
and grumbling at it as a bore." 

" Well," said the Cat, " I am very much obliged to you. 
I suppose I may even get home again. I shall not find a 
wiser friend than you, and perhaps I shall not find another 
good-natured enough to give me so good a dinner. But it 
is very sad." 

" Think of what I have said," answered the Fox. " I '11 
call at your house some night ; you will take me a walk 
round the yard, and then I '11 show you." 

" Not quite," thought the Cat, as she trotted off"; "one 
good turn deserves another, that is true ; and you have 



522 The Cat's Pilgrimage, 

given me a good dinner. But they have given me many 
at home, and I mean to take a few more of them ; so I 
think you must n't go round our yard." 



PART IV. 

The next morning, when the Dog came down to break- 
fast, he found his old friend sitting in her usual place on 
the hearth-rug. 

" Oh ! so you have come back," said he. " How d 'ye do ? 
You don't look as if you had had a very pleasant journey." 

" I have learnt something," said the Cat. " Knowledge 
is never pleasant." 

" Then it is better to be without it," said the Dog. 

" Especially, better to be without knowing how to stand 
on one's hind legs, Dog," said the Cat ; " still, you see, you 
are proud of it ; but I have learnt a great deal, Dog. 
They won't worship you any more, and it is better for you ; 
you wouldn't be any happier. What di''^ you do yester- 
day?" 

" Indeed," said the Dog, " I hardly remember. I slept 
after you went away. In the afternoon I took a drive in 
the carriage. Then I had my dinner. My maid washed 
me and put me to bed. There is the difference between 
you and me : you have to wash yourself and put yourself 
to bed." 

" And you really don't find it a bore, living like this ? 
Would n't you like something to do ? Would n't you like 
some children to play with ? The Fox seemed to find it 
very pleasant." 

'• Children, indeed ! " said the Dog, " when I have got 
men and women. Children are well enough for foxes and 
wild creatures ; refined dogs know better ; and, for doing 



The Cat's Pilgrimage. 523 

— can't I stand on my toes? can't I dance? at least, 
could n't I before I was so fat?" ^^ 

- Ah ! I see every body likes what he was bred to, 
siahed the Cat. " I was bred to do nothing, and I must 
like that. Train the cat as the cat should go, and the cat 
will be happy and ask no questions. Never seek for impos- 
sibilities, Dog. That is the secret." ^^ 
'^ And you have spent a day in the woods to learn that, 
said he. " I could have taught you that. Why, Cat, one 
day when you were sitting scratching your nose before the 
fire, I thought you looked so pretty that I should have 
liked to marry you; but I knew I couldn't, so I didn't 
make myself miserable." 

The Cat looked at him with her odd green eyes. "1 
never wished to marry you, Dog; I shouldn't have pre- 
sumed. But it was wise of you not to fret about it. But, 
listen to me, Dog -listen. I met many creatures in the 
wood, all sorts of creatures, beasts and birds. They were 
all happy; they didn't find it a bore. They went about 
their work, and did it, and enjoyed it, and yet none^ of 
them had the same story to tell. Some did one thing, 
some another ; and, except the Fox, each had got a sort 
of notion of doing its duty. The Fox was a rogue ; he 
said he was ; but yet he was not unhappy. His conscience . 
never troubled him. Your work is standing on your toes, 
and you are happy. I have none, and that is why I am 
unhappy. When I came to think about it, I found every 
creature out in the wood had to get its own living. I tried 
to get mine, but I did n't like it, because I was n't used to it ; 
and as for knowing, the Fox, who didn't care to know any 
thing except how to cheat greater fools than himself, was 
the cleverest fellow I came across. Oh! the Owl, Dog — 
you should have heard the Owl. But I came to this, that 
it was no use trying to know, and the only way to be jolly 
was to go about one's own business like a decent Cat. 
Cats' business seems to be killing rabbits and such-like; 



524 The Oafs Pilgrimage. 

and it is not the pleasantest possible ; so the sooner one is 
bred to it the better. As for me, that have been bred to 
do nothing, why, as I said before, I must try to Hke that ; 
but I consider myself an unfortunate Cat." 

" So don't I consider myself an unfortunate Dog," said 
her companion. 

" Very likely you do not," said the Cat. 

By this time their breakfast was come in. The Cat ate 
hers, the Dog did penance for his ; and if one might judge 
by the purring on the hearth-rug, the Cat, if not the hap- 
piest of the two, at least was not exceedingly miserable. 



FABLES, 



I. — The Lions and the Oxen. 

Once upon a time a number of cattle came out of the 
desert to settle in the broad meadows by a river. They 
were poor and wretched, and they found it a pleasant ex- 
change, — except for a number of lions, who lived in the 
mountains near, and who claimed a right, in consideration 
of permitting the cattle to remain, to eat as many as they 
wanted among them. The cattle submitted, partly because 
they were too weak to help it, partly because the lions said 
it was the will of Jupiter ; and the cattle believed them. 
And so they went on for many ages, till at last, from better 
feeding, the cattle grew larger and stronger, and multiplied 
into great numbers ; and at the same time, from other 
causes, the lions had much diminished: they were fewer, 
smaller, and meaner-looking than they had been ; and ex- 
cept in their own opinion of themselves, and in their appe- 
tites, which were more enormous than ever, there was 
notliing of the old lion left in them. 

One day a large Ox was quietly grazing, when one of 
these lions came up, and desired the Ox to lie down, for he 
wanted to eat him. The Ox raised his head, and gravely 
protested ; the Lion growled ; the Ox was mild, yet firm. 
The Lion insisted upon his legal right, and they agreed to 
refer the matter to Minos. 

When they came into court, the Lion accused the Ox of 
having broken the laws of the beasts. The J^ion was king, 
and the others were bound to obey. Prescriptive usage 



526 Fables. 

was clearly on the Lion's side. Minos called on the Ox for 
his defense. 

The Ox said that, without consent of his own being- 
asked, he had been born into the meadow. He did not con- 
sider himself much of a beast, but, such as he was, he was 
very happy, and gave Jupiter thanks. Now, if the Lion 
could show that the existence of lions was of more impor- 
tance than that of oxen in the eyes of Jupiter, he had 
nothing more to say ; he was ready to sacrifice himself 
But this Lion had already eaten a thousand oxen. Lions' 
appetites were so insatiable that he was forced to ask 
whether they were really worth what was done for them, — 
whether the life of one lion was so noble that the lives of 
thousands of oxen were not equal to it? He was ready to 
own that lions had always eaten oxen, but lions when they 
first came to the meadow were a different sort of creature, 
and they themselves, too (and the Ox looked complacently 
at himself), had improved since that time. Judging by 
appearances, though they might be fallacious, he himself 
was quite as good a beast as the Lion. If the lions would 
lead lives more noble than oxen could live, once more he 
would not complain. As it was, he submitted that the cost 
was too great. 

Then the Lion put on a grand face and tried to roar ; 
but when he opened his mouth he disclosed a jaw so 
drearily furnished that Minos laughed, and told the Ox that 
it was his own fault if he let himself be eaten by such a 
beast as that. If he persisted in declining, he did not think 
the Lion would force him. 



TI. — The Farmer and the Fox. 

A PARMER, whose poultry-yard had suffered severely from 
the foxes, succeeded at last in catching one in a trap. 



FaUes, 527 

" Ah, you rascal ! " said he, as he saw him struggling, " I '11 
teach you to steal my fat geese ! — you shall hang on the 
tree yonder, and your brothers shall see what comes of 
thieving ! " The Farmer was twisting a halter to do what 
he threatened, when the Fox, whose tongue had helped him 
in hard pinches before, thought there could be no liarm in 
trying whether it might not do him one more good turn. 

" You will hang nie," he said, " to frighten by brother 
foxes. On the word of a fox they won't care a rabbit-skin 
for it ; they '11 come and look at me ; but you may depend 
upon it, they will dine at your expense before they go home 
again ! " 

" Then I shall hang you for yourself, as a rogue and a 
rascal," said the Farmer. 

" I am only what Nature, or whatever you call the thing, 
chose to make me," the Fox answered. " I did n't make 
myself." 

" You stole my geese," said the man. 

" Why did Nature make me like geese, then ? " said the 
Fox. " Live and let live ; give me my share, and I won't 
touch yours : but you keep them all to yourself" 

" I don't understand your fine talk," answered the 
Farmer ; " but I know that you are a thief, and that you 
deserve to be hanged." 

His head is too thick to let me catch him so, thought the 
Fox ; I wonder if his heart is any softer ! " You are taking 
away the life of a fellow-creature," he said ; " that 's a re- 
sponsibility — it is a curious thing that life, and who knows 
what conies after it ? You say I am a rogue — I say I am 
not ; but at any rate I ought not to be hanged — for if I 
am not, I don't deserve it ; and if I am, you should give 
me time to repent ! " I have him now, thought the Fox ; 
let him get out if he can. 

" Why, what would you have me do with you ? " said the 
man. 

" My notion is that you should let me go, and give me a 



528 Fables. 

lamb, or goose or two, every month, and then I could live 
without stealing ; but perhaps you know better than me, 
and I am a rogue ; my education may have been neglected ; 
you should shut me up, and take care of me, and teach 
me. Who knows but in the end 1 may turn into a dog ? " 

" Very pretty," said the Farmer ; " we have dogs enough, 
and more, too, than we can take care of, without you. No, 
no. Master Fox, I have caught you, and you shall swing, 
whatever is the logic of it. There will be one rogue less 
in the world, anyhow." 

" It is mere hate and unchristian vengeance," said the 
Fox. 

" No, friend," the Farmer answered ; " I don't hate you, 
and I don't want to revenge myself on you ; but you and I 
can't get on together, and 1 think I am of more importance 
than you. If nettles and thistles grow in my cabbage- 
garden, I don't try to persuade them to grow into cab- 
bages. I just dig them up. I don't hate them ; but I 
feel somehow that they must n't hinder me with my cab- 
bages, and that I must put them away ; and so, my poor 
friend, I am sorry for you, but I am afraid you must 
swing." 



PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE. 



It was after one of those heavy convulsions which have 
divided era from era, and left mankind to start again from 
the beginning, that a number of brave men gathered to- 
gether to raise anew from the ground a fresh green home 
for themselves. The rest of the surviving race were shel- 
tering themselves amidst the old ruins, or in the caves on 
the mountains, feeding on husks and shells ; but these men 
with clear heads and brave hearts ploughed and harrowed 
the earth, and planted seeds, and watered them, and 
watched them ; and the seeds grew and shot up with the 
sjDring, but one was larger and fairer than the rest, and the 
other plants seemed to know it, for they crawled along till 
they reached the large one ; and they gathered round it, 
and clung to it, and grew into it ; and soon they became 
one great stem, with branching roots feeding it as from 
many fountains. Then the men got great heart in them 
when they saw that, and they labored more bravely, dig- 
ging about it in the hot sun, till at last it became great and 
mighty, and its roots went down into the heart of the earth, 
and its branches stretched over all the plain. 

Then many others of mankind, when they saw the tree 
was beautiful, came down and gathered under it, and those 
who had raised it received them with open arms, and they 
all sat under its shade together, and gathered its fruits, and 
made their homes there, rejoicing in its loveliness. And 
ages passed away, and all that generation passed away, and 
still the tree grew stronger and fairer, and their children's 

34 



530 Parable of the Bread-fruit Tree, 

children watched it age after age, as it lived on and flow- 
ered and seeded. And they said in their hearts, The tree 
is immortal — it will never die. They took no care of the 
seed ; the scent of the flowers and the taste of the sweet 
fruit was all they thought of; and the winds of heaven, and 
the wild birds, and the beasts of the field caught the stray 
fruits and seed-dust, and bore the seed away, and scattered 
it in far-off soils. 

And by and by, at a great, great age, the tree at last be- 
gan to cease to grow, and then to faint and droop : its 
leaves were not so thick, its flowers were not so fragrant ; 
and from time to time the night winds, which before had 
passed away, and had been never heard, came moaning and 
siohino^ amon^ the branches. And the men for a while 
doubted and denied — they thought it was the accident of 
the seasons ; and then a branch fell, and they said it was a 
storm, and such a storm as came but once in a thousand 
years. At last there could be no doubt that the leaves 
were thin and sear and scanty — that the sun shone 
through them — that the fruit was tasteless. But the oren- 
eration was gone away which had known the tree in its 
beauty, and so men said it was always so — its fruits were 
never better — its foliage never was thicker. 

So things went on, and from time to time strangers 
would come among them, and would say. Why are you sit- 
ting here under the old tree ? there are young trees grown 
of the seed of this tree, far away, more beautiful than it 
ever was ; see, we have brought you leaves and flowers to 
show you. But the men would not listen. They were 
angry, and some they drove away, and some they killed, 
and poured their blood round the roots of the tree, saying, 
They have spoken evil of our tree ; let them feed it now 
with their blood. At last some of their own wiser ones 
brought out specimens of the old fruits, which had been 
laid up to be preserved, and compared them with the pres- 
ent bearing, and they saw that the tree was not as it had 



Parable of the Bread-fruit Tree, 531 

been ; and such of them as were good men reproached 
themselves, and said it was their own fault. They had 
not watered it ; they had forgotten to manure it. So, like 
their first fathers, they labored with might and main, and 
for a while it seemed as if they might succeed, and for a 
few years branches, which were almost dead when the 
spring came round, put out some young green shoots 
again. But it was only for a few years ; there was not 
enough of living energy in the tree. Half the labor which 
was wasted on it would have raised another nobler one far 
away. So the men grew soon weary, and looked for a 
shorter way : and some gathered up the leaves and shoots 
which the strangers had brought, and grafted them on, if 
perhaps they might grow ; but they could not grow on a 
dying stock, and they, too, soon drooped and became as the 
rest. And others said. Come, let us tie the preserved fruits 
on again ; perhaps they will join again to the stem, and give 
it back its life. But there were not enough, for only a few 
had been preserved ; so they took painted paper and wax 
and clay, and cut sham leaves and fruits of the old pattern, 
which for a time looked bright and gay, and the world, 
who did not know what had been done, said, — See, the 
tree is immortal : it is green again. Then some believed, 
but many saw that it was a sham, and liking better to bear 
the sky and sun, without any shade at all, than to live in a 
lie, and call painted paper leaves and flowers, they passed 
out in search of other homes. But the larger number 
stayed behind ; they had lived so long in falsehood that 
they had forgotten there was any such thing as truth at all ; 
the tree had done very well for them — it would do very 
well for their children. And if their children, as they grew 
up, did now and then happen to open their eyes and see 
how it really was, they learned from their fathers to hold 
their tongues about it. If the little ones and the weak 
ones believed, it answered all purposes, and change was 
inconvenient. They might smile to themselves at the 



532 Parable of the Bread-Fruit Tree, 

folly which they countenanced, but they were discreet, and 
they would not expose it. This is the state of the tree, 
and of the men who are under it at this present time : — 
they say it still does very well. Perhaps it does — but, 
stem and boughs and paper leaves, it is dry for the burn- 
ing, and if the lightning touches it, those who sit beneath 
will suffer. 



COMPENSATION. 



One day an Antelope was lying with her fawn at the foot 
of the flowering Mimosa. The weather was intensely sultry, 
and a Dove, who had sought shelter from, the heat among 
the leaves, was cooing above her head. 

" Happy bird ! " said the Antelope. " Happy bird ! to 
whom the air is given for an inheritance, and whose flight 
is swifter than the wind. At your will you alight upon the 
ground, at your will you sweep into the sky, and fly races 
with the driving clouds ; while I, poor I, am bound a pris- 
oner to this miserable earth, and wear out my pitiable life 
crawling to and fro upon its surface." 

Then the Dove answered, " It is sweet to sail along the 
sky, to fly from land to land, and coo among the valleys ; 
but, Antelope, when I have sat above amidst the branches 
and watched your little one close its tiny lips upon your 
breast, and feed its life on yours, I have felt that I could 
strip oif my wings, lay down my plumage, and remain all 
my life upon the ground only once to know such blessed 
enjoyment." 

The breeze sighed among the boughs of the Mimosa, 
and a voice came trembling out of the rustling leaves : " If 
the Antelope mourns her destiny, what should the Mimosa 
do ? The Antelope is the swiftest among the animals. It 
rises in the morning ; the ground flies under its feet — in 
the evening it is a hundred miles away. The Mimosa is 
feeding its old age on the same soil which quickened its 
seed-cell into activity. The seasons roll by me and leave 



634 Compensation. 

me in the old place. The winds sway among my branches, 
as if they longed to bear me away with them, but they pass 
on and leave me behind. The wild birds come and go. 
The flocks move by me in the evening on their way to the 
pleasant waters. I can never move. My cradle must be 
my grave." 

Then from below, at the root of the tree, came a voice 
which neither bird, nor antelope, nor tree had ever heard, 
as a Rock Crystal from its prison in the limestone followed 
on the words of the Mimosa. 

" Are ye all unhappy ? " it said. " If ye are, then what 
am I ? Ye all have life. You ! O Mimosa, you ! whose fair 
flowers year by year come again to you, ever young, and 
fresh, and beautiful — you who can drink the rain with 
your leaves, who can wanton with the summer breeze, and 
open your breast to give a home to the wild birds, look at 
me and be ashamed. I only am truly wretched." 

" Alas ! " said the Mimosa, " we have life, which you have 
not, it is true. We have also what you have not, its shadow 
— death. My beautiful children, which year by year I 
bring out into being, expand in their loveliness only to die. 
Where they are gone I too shall soon follow, while you 
will flash in the light of the last sun which rises upon the 
earth." 



THE END. 



